I run Home Assistant in Proxmox on my mini PC, along with multiple other services. I use local LLMs running in Ollama, but they're very slow on my local hardware. I've always wanted to use a local LLM to make my local voice assistant smarter, but until now, it's always been far too slow or inaccurate to be of any use.

The beauty of ESP32 boards is that you can add additional hardware to them to make them even more versatile. An ESP32 board that includes an NFC reader opens up a whole world of possibilities. You can use one in combination with smart home software such as Home Assistant to replace a wide range of smart home devices, often for a fraction of the price.

I use local LLMs on a daily basis, but in my personal setup, they're only really useful for a limited selection of tasks. I wanted to see how a local LLM could handle everyday tasks. My most powerful device for running LLMs is my M2 MacBook Air with only 8GB of RAM, so while more powerful hardware could do much more, these results should broadly match what you can do on similar hardware.

It's a classic question in the world of electronic devices: can it run Doom? For a Raspberry Pi 3B+, the answer is a resounding yes. Doom is now more than 30 years old, so a more pertinent question is: can it run a local LLM? I took an LLM for a spin on a Raspberry Pi to see what was possible.

Since jailbreaking my Kindle, I’ve had a lot of fun exploring what I can do with it. At the heart of everything is KOReader, the document viewer app that you can use instead of the stock Kindle reading software. There's a lot to discover in KOReader, including some very useful plugins.

I held off jailbreaking my Kindle for a long time, as I was afraid of bricking a device I was still using. When Amazon dropped support for my Kindle 4, there was no longer anything holding me back, so I performed the jailbreak and installed KOReader. Now I wish I'd done it sooner; KOReader's PDF support is so much better.

I love my Kindle. I've used it for 15 years, and it's served me well throughout that entire time. The problem isn't the hardware; it's the ecosystem that goes with it. That's why I won't ever buy another Kindle; I don't trust Amazon to give it the long life it deserves.

If you want to monitor your home network, router apps can often provide useful information. Some of these apps require paid subscriptions to access the most useful data. I built my own network monitoring dashboard in Home Assistant, and it cost me nothing.

Since I've jailbroken my ancient Kindle 4, I've been amazed by what I've been able to do with it. I've turned it into an E-Ink smart home dashboard, used it as a Pocket replacement, and even made it into a slow-refresh secondary monitor. I'd seen that you could add an LLM to KOReader, but I wondered if this was taking things too far.

If you've ever wondered why one of the ports on the back of your TV appears to glow, that's the optical digital audio output via a TOSLINK port. It uses light to transmit data through a fiber-optic cable, which is why the port can appear to glow. While HDMI ARC and eARC have become the standard way to connect a TV to speakers, there are still a surprising number of things you can use your optical audio port for.

The internet is a wonderful thing, but we don't always appreciate it. It's only when we lose access that we remember how amazing it really is to have access to pretty much all the information that exists. My internet went down recently, and it took me far too long to notice, so I built myself a tiny internet status light to keep track.

Google offers a lot of very useful free office apps, including Google Docs, Google Sheets, Gmail, Google Slides, and more. Many beginners fail to take advantage of the integration between these apps, however. Using the power of Google Drive, you can save yourself a lot of busywork and get things done far more quickly.

I used Windows for many years before switching to macOS, and I still regularly use Windows on a laptop and in virtual machines. Switching between the two often makes me wish that my Mac had some of the native features of Windows.

Smart plugs are a great way to make dumb devices smart. As long as your dumb device will start up without any additional button presses, you can use a smart plug to turn it on and off remotely, just like any other smart device. There are some cases, however, where using a smart plug is not a great idea.

Self-hosting is really a hobby in itself. Once you get the bug, it's hard to stop adding more and more self-hosted services or spending even more money on your home lab setup. Self-hosting also makes several hobbies possible that wouldn't really work without it.

I've been tinkering with my smart home for well over a decade, so it's rare that I come across anything that feels truly new. Sometimes, however, I find ideas that I've not seen before, and it's always a breath of fresh air. Quite literally, in the case of one of these projects.

What I want from AI is for it to take the boring and mundane jobs off my hands and free me up to do more fun stuff. Reading my emails before starting work each day is time-consuming and dull, so I decided to hand the task off to Claude.

One of the strongest arguments for buying physical media in a digital world is the unwritten rule that "the disc is always the true version." It's long been the case that buying DVDs or Blu-rays allows access to original edits or missing episodes that aren't available on any streaming service. However, for one of my favorite shows, streaming has now become the version that's more faithful to the original.

My phone is constantly bombarded with notifications. I try to limit them as much as possible, but even so, they quickly become easy to ignore. Sometimes, Home Assistant needs to alert me about something important, such as a water leak being detected, and these are notifications I really don't want to miss. There are several methods I use to make notifications almost impossible to miss.