 Welcome to the Home Lab Show, episode 94, more Home Assistant tips, tricks, and ideas. We talked about this recently, I know, but this apparently triggered Jay into a state of deep research and focus, I would say. Hyper focus. Hyper focus, Jay took this to the next level, so we're gonna share some more tips on this and maybe we'll coax Jay into doing some videos on the topic as well that'll get even more detailed, but I think it's worth bringing up because Home Assistant, and we got some news announcements around it, we'll talk about too, is really like, it just fits in the pocket of not just Home Lab, but I would say even a lot of businesses, I'm talking to more people that go, you know, I just don't wanna tie things to the cloud, I wanna be able to manage and see a lot of data locally, and the amount of integrations you get from this self-hosted app are pretty amazing, so I think it's just such a good fit for the audience here, and it is certainly an endless rabbit hole of fun, of automating everything at a level of detail that's pretty incredible. So it's kind of our topic today, but we have a few other things we're gonna bring up as well. As we changed the show format up a little bit, I'm bringing this to you, we're gonna have a little bit of a different cadence where we try to bring you some of the updates because there's so many things happening, we wanna make sure everyone's aware of some of the new fun features that come out with popular software used in all the Home Lab and things to get you started. But before we start all of that, we have to thank a sponsor of the show and that is our friends at Akamai. Yes, Akamai, formerly known as the, what is it? The artist formerly known as Prince or the place formerly known as Leno, but there's still Leno DNA in there. They still have been really great to work with. So the Akamai Cloud, great place to host your services, great place to host things that maybe you don't want in your lab, but maybe sit better on that cloud. They give you a lot of services and those services have actually expanded since their acquisition. So there's even more reasons to use them. Their app store is cool. There's a project me and Jay will be discussing soon that we won't have it all public yet, but it's all more good stuff and we have more knowledge. We're gonna be dropping courtesy of Akamai. We've been working with them on some fun projects. We do recommend them. We think they've been a great sponsor of the show. There's an offer code down below to get you signed up with them if you're interested. And we thank them for being a sponsor pretty much since the beginning. They're still happy engaging with them. Absolutely. First on our agenda of the Home Lab show is feedback. And this is an interesting question and I know there can be challenges with doing this. I don't know, I've not tested this as an edge case. It should work whether or not you run to any performance problems is the question. And this comes from the user that starts with, had a question, is there any conflict running ButterFS file systems in an LXD container storage pools instance on top of ZFS pools on a storage backend such as TrueNAS. I know I can't in ZFS file systems due to version conflicts. They seem to run fine and make snapshots more efficient but can't find much edge cases. Yeah, this is an interesting discussion because when you're doing this you may run into like an optimization problem. And it was interesting because it was within the last few episodes of the two and a half at admins podcast. If you're not familiar with them check out that podcast, it's great but they have a couple of good discussions around ZFS and what happens when you run ZFS inside of ZFS what works and what doesn't but there's a lot of weird edge cases of performance that can come out of it. Not functionality, like it seems to work and be stable but it's kind of like this weird alignment problem and you are in kind of uncharted territory because they were talking about ZFS running inside of a virtual machine that is also backed by something running ZFS. But the same rules apply. I don't see a problem with it from a reliability standpoint. I don't know how much it would enhance your performance but our FS has its own caching mechanism. ZFS has its own caching mechanism where the inefficiencies lie or more efficiencies is going to be up in the air. So what do you think on that Jake? Kind of the same? Yeah, for the most part I feel like it should work but you run into these weird edge cases and I think that's the nature of the question where if you have one file system that does things a certain way they're both copy and write file systems. So I mean that they're in the same category but how they organize things, features that work in one may not work in the other especially if butter, FS or some features that aren't considered ready. So I am normally a fan of just setting up a lab and trying it out. Like if you're curious just try it but I think the nature of the question is are there gonna be quirks that you might run into later and that becomes really hard to test in a lab because there could be an intermittent issue. So the, I mean for the most part I would say the Lexi container shouldn't or Lexi whatever whichever it is shouldn't really notice that it's on CFS because it's almost like a VM doesn't always and most of the time doesn't know what kind of storage it's on but the problem might be with how the two interact with each other. I mean one way to find out is just to run something not production or something that you depend on but just run it for a while and just kind of see what happens or some updates on it and things like that and just see if anything kind of stands out as weird. I don't know if there's any issue but I kind of tend to want to test that kind of thing. And I would say, because you can automate your testing and do something a lot more intense and gain metrics from it that are very detailed is Veronica's test suite. And I thought I'd do a video on it because I mean it's well known but sometimes it's weird when people go hey what are you using? And I'm like maybe it's not as well known as I thought because to me Veronica's is like the go-to website and their test suite is just amazing. And the automation level you can get in it is a little hard to set up because their documentation is not 100 it's very technical and not step one, step two. Like the base running pharaonics is easy. The automation where you can actually it has a web interface and not everyone knows that you can turn on the web interface and build a schedule of all these different things you want to do and concurrently with other VMs for example. So you can actually have it like a coordination server where you can say run pharaonics on these eight virtual machines that I've set up and at this time and run them all sequentially or simultaneously you've got different options like that for scheduling. And this can really put a heavy workload on there give you the metrics back because like let's say we see what happens with one VM two VMs, three VMs. And then you can go look at the aggregate statistics it gathers and it produces those really nice charts that are all documented with your notes in them because for each run you give it a note like this configuration is this scenario and it just does all the nice aggregation work for you so you don't have to like note this in the spreadsheet I've used a lot of my channel but this is a good way to load test it because you can set up the type of scenarios and by the way when you run a pharaonics test for a scenario like building a kernel it loads and builds the kernel it doesn't just run a simulated benchmark it just automates some task like querying a SQL database or running Apache it actually runs some of those in the background to give you extremely accurate workloads so it's kind of a fun way to test this I don't think there's any reliability or risk you have running this but it would be it's an interesting what is that edge case where they perform better or what's the edge case they perform worse you are an uncharted territory my friend and this is what the homelab's about Yeah what happens when you have a butterFS snapshot and a ZFS snapshot and you restore one and not the other things like that are gonna be potentially interesting Yeah it's definitely I don't have the time to set one up myself so we'll wait to hear we don't mind some feedback on this let us know how it goes or if you find something unusual send an email over to us speaking of that feedback at the homelab show this is where these questions can easily be sent to us we still have the form on the site but people seem to prefer to email us so that is definitely the way to do it there's just email us and we'll take the time to answer the question actually nobody has a question so we'll just jump over to the next which is some updates to some software I wanted to bring up now I haven't done a video on it yet but there is a new version at your NAS scale out which is awesome they have been working away I have a bug I wanna test before I do my video I wanna see if they solved it there's a weird encryption performance bug I ran into so there's a potential for maybe that being fixed I was vague of whether or not that issue was fixed the new UI is available for VMware migration in Zen Orchestra I did do a video on this and it's pretty cool and for those of you that are going you know I wanna get off VMware but you know can you make this easier on me I don't wanna do I mean we've talked about me and Jay have cloning and things like that and that's where they're really putting a lot of effort into this because it's just an easy migration path you're on your older version of VMware you connect your Zen Orchestra to your VMware and it then migrates all your VMs to the new machine and life is good so but how many clonezilla in between yeah matter of fact especially if you've got like 20 VMs I mean I gotta admit if you have 20, 30 VMs and following the process me and Jay talked about clonezilla is 20, 30 times more tedious this is why she migrated all the VMs right over and it's just it's too cool not to talk about and what I've been told and I don't know I don't really keep up with VMware licensing someone said they increased what they're charging for even the lower tiers for it but if you're looking to come over to the XCPNG world hey why not come on over they're making it easy and welcoming to do so so I thought that was pretty cool this is also part of the free version so this is not if you're wondering when it comes as an orchestra the question comes up and I did the demo with the free version to let people know in the home lab yes you can compile this yourself yes it's fully available and accessible to you without any licensing then we have HomeSeer this is another piece of interesting news there's that the HomeSeer is now part of the HomeSeer is now a member of the works with Home Assistant Partner Program and I thought this was kind of neat because this just opens up even more devices that are accessible so they announced an official partnership there's a lot of things you could always get working in Home Assistant but it's even cooler when many companies are getting more and more cooperative with Home Assistant because they realize it's popularity in the marketplace which is awesome and it's just kind of a neat thing being able to tie more and more things in there I'm actually shocked because someone complained about them being expensive and you're not wrong like I have some huge lights in here and if you said they're overpriced I agree with you but when you find them on clearance at your local hardware store you go to then all the local hardware stores and you buy all the lights all my huge lights I put around my house I would not have paid but I got 80% off on them so if you can find a deal on these lights turns out they'll work great with Home Assistant they actually are I got to admit they're nicer than some of the other ones I've tried like InnoValley's the InnoValley's work but I find them a little bit more quirky even though they're listed as working with them the updates don't go as smooth like when you do transitions to different colors compared to the way it used who's made a good product but boy do they charge for it Yeah but I know yeah the clearance thing is great like I may have rated a number of K-Marts and they were on the final stages of going down and you know grabbing some things and I think I got 80% off of some things so I mean it never seems to be a clearance deal I mean that's the cheapest anything they can get at that point they just want it out the door they don't even want to profit so Yes I agree and Jay has some tips though of something we won't declare it 100% solved but it's something that is a recommended best use case for the one you set up Proxmox and the way it does Horosync so if you can explain that troubleshooting tip that you had for us Yeah so this is something that I've been running into and I'm gonna give a disclaimer I'm not 100% confident that this is the solution to my problem but it might be sometimes when you run into something intermittent the only thing that'll give you confidence is just a lot of time passing in between you know if it doesn't happen for a number of months or something but the issue I'd run into is every now and then one of my Proxmox nodes would just drop off the network and it's been fine for years and then all of a sudden it's just gone like it's running but the network card is just offline and sometimes it's just frozen so I never really knew why I started Googling around and then someone mentioned that this kind of thing can happen if you don't have the Horosync network on its own network so what I mean is it's on its own Nick and in my case I set it up on a VLAN a different subnet and I made it so that nothing else can see it but basically the idea being that Horosync is like the cluster network it communicates between the nodes and that needs to work so well that you need to have like a I think it's like a 0.5 millisecond or something like that or a very low response time is what's needed to keep Horosync happy but then what happens when you have like a bunch of network traffic like you know you're backing up a bunch of VMs and you just have bits flying through your cards and then at that point it's theoretically possible it could be getting in the way of the cluster network and if it can't communicate then some things start to go down so it all makes sense so I implemented this so again it was just a separate Nick I have a 10 gig card but I felt like 10 gig is overkill for Horosync so I had a one gig Nick that was just not used by anything because I think there was like four built into the motherboard or something so I just dedicated a port to this network on each of these servers and then set up a VLAN and the thing is you're not going to notice at least I don't think any performance improvements by doing this it's a best practice by default everything's on one network but you know honestly when you get to a certain point you should probably start separating things and I think that's what I started to hit because my traffic on the VMs is just getting to a point because it does match when my size got to a certain point so I'm thinking there's a strong possibility this is it but even if this is not the cause of my issue because I even had someone suggest to take a look at the SFP adapters because that can sometimes cause this but I ruled that out that wasn't the issue so then I'm going down this road but even again even if it doesn't fix it it's a best practice so you're not going to be harmed by having this in place other than the amount of time to take you to set it up but you're only setting up a very small network for very specific nodes so basically it should be a little easier than most I think Yeah and it's just to reiterate like the going down problem comes probably from Jay Oversaturating during his backups on there it's just weird that it doesn't how the recovery works on it because don't you have to reboot the Proxbox to get it working Yeah either the whole thing will be frozen or that 10 gig card will be just off the bus it's like what? I think that might possibly mean that it could be something else but I've replaced the 10 gig card because of this because I thought well maybe it's bad and then it didn't happen for a couple of months until it happened again so it's like one of those causation correlation kinds of things here but when I looked at some forum post someone else posted having the same problem and then someone like their first reply to that message was you probably have CoroSync on the same network as your human network and that kind of thing can happen so there is definitely reason to believe that this can be caused by that on account of the fact that people in the Proxmox forums will point this out that there could be erratic behavior if you're sharing these I would think for most people you may not run into this but then again you could have just the right amount of Plex traffic for example maybe if you just have a weird situation where everyone in your house is in their room and they're all watching Plex at the same time I don't know it could be weird stuff like this that could happen so if you run into this it's the best practice if you have the capability of doing this if you have an extra NIC I wouldn't go out and buy one an extra network card unless you usually have an extra one usually have an extra one you're like those one gigs I'm not doing anything with them anyways so pretty much I mean with the exception being the IoT network I use that too on a one gig NIC because I figure that doesn't need 10 gig just to turn on my like hopefully your IoT doesn't need 10 gig that'd be crazy well you know what with home assistant being such a rabbit hole I think someone in our audience has probably gotten to a point where they need to I mean it's doubtful but it's possible you never know never know never know speaking of home assistant Jay would you do the home assistant? you mean besides being obsessed with it and kind of like being unable to pry myself away from it and spending too many hours at night to the point where I'm losing sleep yeah that's a rabbit hole so when I get obsessed with something all of a sudden it's like go big or go home I'm already home so why not go big so here's the thing so I've mentioned a few times I'm getting more and more caught up that's a long process but it continues and I was able to finish like I think 10 renders in a week at one point so my editing queue is dropping but what do I do with that extra time well I've been neglecting home assistant so I decided to really dive in and I found a couple of things that I feel like people may not know for some of you this might be common knowledge and you know that it is what it is but for some of you you might not know that this some of this capability exists so what I decided to do was redo all of my dashboards I felt like they're too busy they're too cluttered there's too much going on there and one important thing about home automation especially if you don't live by yourself if you have other people if you have a roommate or family or something let's just say you want them to use it but maybe they're not technical like you are and they kind of don't care but they do to be supportive you know who I'm talking about like your family member wants to wants to be on the same team as you to show support but they really don't understand this stuff but it gets frustrating for them if they're not technical because they're not going to understand like why are all these buttons needed I just want to turn on the lights right that's all they want to do why do I have to go through all this to turn on lights so I feel like they call it spouse approval but it's not just you know spouse approval it's whoever you live with that may not want to be bothered with this kind of thing but might still benefit from home automation the idea is to keep it simple you know as few buttons as possible that was my challenge to you know really get it down to what's required and also hide the things that aren't necessary for example if your TV isn't on all the time then why have a now playing card on your dashboard all the time if your TV is not on doesn't make sense I mean but what's horrible about that is you either have the card on the screen or you don't so you just want to benefit from that or you don't but it's either there or it's not but I found out that's not true actually you could put what's you could add what's called a conditional card and this is the first tip where you could literally have an if then statement and that's how it's shown there and you could set up if this is you know if this device is on show this card so that way you could have a media player app no media player card right so you have a media player card on your dashboard and you could set its presence to depend on the media device itself being on so if you turn it off the card goes away you turn on your TV the card comes up so I went kind of crazy with that I was like okay rather than having a button for every single light I'll have one button that controls all the lights and then when it comes to the TV you have the card for playing whatever you're playing is there if the conditional check is true so that helps but then I've also discovered that you can create a navigation in a normal button so you can leave the entity blank and then you could have the click action instead of being a toggle it could be a navigate to another page and I didn't know you could do this but it's just one of the features that's built in and nothing I've mentioned so far requires an add-on, a plug-in or anything we're just talking home assistant you add a conditional card if then statement add something if it's needed or have it be hidden if it's not but when you have other menus you could actually hide the menus from the interface by calling them a sub menu in the settings and this is the second tip I didn't know you could do so if you set a dashboard as a sub menu then it's hidden and inaccessible from the dashboard there's nowhere you can click to get to it but that's great because you can create the button that takes the person to it so what I did was I set on the TV for example a long press or long tab you just hold your finger on it hold your mouse cursor on it and it'll do a different action so a click will turn it on holding down the mouse button or long touch will take you to a sub menu that has all the controls for the TV rather than having all the controls for the TV be on your dashboard all the time so what you're doing is you are making it less overwhelming for someone else I'm sure you as the person that's designing your home assistant you know what every button does and you probably don't even understand why other people think it's complicated right you's like well what do you mean it's complicated it's easy look there's a button for each of the 45 things I have in the room what's difficult about that but other people look at that and they're like oh my God that's a lot of buttons right so having roommate approval I don't know what the correct term is but I should say average person approval is definitely a win for your home automation because then you get buy-in from the people that live with you and then it starts to really get to be something amazing because if you think about it from their eyes like I just want to turn on the lights so for example in my home assistant I'll have one button for all the lights but the problem is sometimes you want to configure the lights you know independently you don't always want every light on sometimes you might want your lamp on but your overhead light off so then I set up a menu where if you long tap on the light icon then you get another menu that gives you individual control of every light in that room but only when you long press if you just tap on it turns everything on tap on it turns everything off and then the submenus are behind a long press submenu and then I created my own navigation menu by just having a series of buttons hiding the icons just putting text there you know here's all the rooms office, den you know whatever and someone sees that on home assistant they see a menu easy oh I want to turn on the light in the den it says den I'll tap on den there's a big light icon there then that's the only icon there I'll tap on that lights come on they're happy if they care about the lights they could choose an individual one behind a submenu but these are features that kind of discovered on accident just kind of playing around with this and it might not sound like much but when you think about this you could really customize your dashboards to be dynamic rather than everything always being visible and I think that will give you a lot more control over what you have and speaking of control here's another tip if you didn't already know there's cards available again nothing I'm saying relies on an add-on so far and that's still true there's vertical stacks and horizontal stacks and this really helps because you could have icons or any other cards that are joined together vertically or horizontally depending on what you want to do and then you could start embedding conditional checks within vertical stacks so think of it this way you have a vertical stack where the top card is the power button for a TV for example I'll keep using that example and then the card underneath is a conditional check to show the now playing when the TV is actually on but they're in a vertical stack so you don't have to worry about the power button for the TV being moved all the way to the right and then the now playing card appearing all the way on the right now we have what looks like an actual relationship between the TV button and the now playing button which is going to be obvious for everyone like oh I turned on the TV and now there's a now playing card directly underneath the TV button so that now playing card probably goes to that TV it just makes sense and I kind of went crazy with this idea and these features I'm not sure how well known they are maybe everybody listening or like yeah we've all known about that forever but if you haven't known about any of these things you know I think that this might be something that could help you simplify your dashboards quite a bit One thing I'll note too and I think in our last so much we only mentioned it the PF sense integration is actually pretty slick you can have it tied to your firewall rules you can have it enabled disable rules so if you have something you only want on sometimes you could use Home Assistant to say you know I want to open this up or not open this up turn this firewall rule on have the status of your firewall know if there's any issues like loss and things like that one thing that I really how I use Home Assistant and the way you can really think of it is becoming the one place the thing we talk about in the enterprise world the single pane of glass that gives us all our data and Home Assistant really can be that for you I'm almost done with a video I'll be doing about how I've integrated Home Assistant with my Synology Surveillance Station because my wife uses the Surveillance Station through the app all the time she doesn't actually go to the DSCAM app anymore she can see what she wants to see can give her notices she can set things on there it is a it's really cool and I see someone in the comments here saying this yeah me and Jay both want to make some videos on how we've integrated it to show you like in a very visual way how we've created some of these features it's just kind of cool the more I've pulled in there I recently became among the people to finally get an IOT device I have a roaming vacuum in my house and it turns out I'm excited not about the roaming vacuum that seems to make the wife happy but I like the fact that I can integrate it into Home Assistant and it will tell me what it's doing it'll tell me on the bins full it's just kind of a novel thing I haven't done that yet I want to make sure it works first because it was tricky to set up because you know security but yeah I have a network because that's where IOT devices go so yes roaming robot vacuums or IOT devices in case anyone's wondering so in regard to doing videos about this because this is the topic I'll bring up just so people understand the issue with choosing topics on YouTube and I think you know unless you are really into the YouTube space you're not going to understand this whether I want to make a video or not I mean that should be my only deciding factor right if I want to do a video I want to do a video I'll do the video but fortunately with YouTube sometimes it forces us to be in a silo even if we don't want to be so I'll give you a perfect example of this and I'm going to be completely transparent here so when I reviewed the HP Dev one I mean we're talking like a I don't know one or two maybe even three weeks of testing I had that very early before as even announced spent a lot of time with it and I put it through its paces and the video I'm pretty sure that like 30,000 views I think so basically you know that sounds like a successful video but I made $20 in ad revenue so far total since that video came out from then until now $20 like that's not even the Taco Bell dinner for the entire family right so but then again I could create another video that's a tutorial that gets like a fourth of the views that gets a lot of money in ad revenue it's like what's going on so what happens is what YouTube decides is your topic area may not completely align because in my mind an HP Dev one video is perfectly on topic because it's a Linux laptop but to YouTube it's like oh he's reviewing hardware now he normally does tutorials well we're not going to show this or give him any money for this but that's outside of his well it also reduce the views and everything else that too YouTube actually sends us a notice when we go outside of our topic it's a weird problem they came on you for doing something like that and it's on topic it's just they don't know the Linux link so I guess what does that have to do with Home Assistant so the honest truth is I want to do videos about it I probably will but I can't promise it because it's possible that if I do create a video about this nobody will see it because the algorithm won't send it to anyone because if YouTube thinks that home automation is too far outside my topic it's just going to decide well his audience doesn't care about that so we're not going to show it to anyone so it's like it should be my choice but it's YouTube's choice right and I think that's horrible because I want to do this video anyway long story made short I will try to do a video I can't promise it but maybe it'll be fun to do an experiment and see if the algorithm accepts my Home Assistant topic or something is just a ridiculous thing that we have to deal with yeah so maybe so it's a maybe I'll do a video on it hope algorithm be damned people want to see it I know it's just you know this is the problem with automation and AI you know they I don't know if it's AI I have no idea how this works but sometimes when you have data modeling it might look a certain way to a computer but as humans will see a link between two things and we'll know the link and it'll be obvious to us it's like oh Jay the Linux guy is reviewing a Linux laptop that makes sense I think that's what most people think YouTube thinks of it as another way so you know just one of those inside struggles that we kind of talk about in our weekly calls and kind of complain about because it's annoying but basically if you don't see Home Assistant videos for me trust me I want to do it I'll probably do it but we'll see where it lands and we'll go from there yep but yeah it'd be fun to do because I think that's kind of the challenge of a podcast it's one thing to tell people these features exist but I do feel like a certain subset of the audience is gonna probably not care because if they're a visual learner they're just not gonna get the picture unless they see it and then it clicks so you know unfortunately it's kind of hard to paint that picture without actually showing you the picture and I think that would make a lot more sense if people were able to see it so maybe one of these days I'll throw together an overview video where I'll just show it and then if that does well then maybe we'll go from there and then there might be more Home Assistant coverage on the channel yeah so if we do do it make sure you're watching because that helps the YouTube algorithm know that you should watch it that we should make more yeah yeah just spam that F5 button don't do that don't do that they probably know about that they're not that stupid but if only right but yeah sometimes I mean someone in the chat was saying what if you say HA on Linux or Home Assistant on Linux or something like that I think that's the truth to that because here's the thing if I do a review on a piece of hardware it results in you know less ad revenue and also fewer views but if I you know let's just say for example I'm reviewing a Raspberry Pi product and I phrase it as a review it'll do it won't do as well but if I make the same video but spin it as a tutorial you know a project then it's going to go crazy but it's the same content you know it's just like I'm giving an opinion about something and showing you how to use it I mean it's not all that different from one of the others so you know that individual who mentioned that yeah you're onto something here that's a very good point and yes that does actually work sometimes and we do that sometimes like yeah if I put this out as a review it won't do well but I'll just do a tutorial instead and then watch it just go crazy it's just weird yep but what's the next tip for Home Assistant did you cover them all those are the main ones off the top of my head because I do have more but the problem then becomes I'm overloading you with talking about something that I think is best done by seeing it but with these tips I think if you take this far enough and just use your imagination these things sound simple but you could really go crazy with this and do some pretty fun things but I want to mention you there's something you did that I was hoping you'd bring up that's why I didn't know if you had it what is that maybe I forgot yeah I know well you have the tool to control your fans now I think it was the one I sent you oh right the mention the device IR Blaster IR Blaster this is a cool thing and me and Jay were in discussion cause he's like yeah I wish I could control these fans I'll make actually and what happens all the time explain the IR Blaster a little bit I think it's kind of neat so if you're like me and I would and maybe you'll see this in the background if you're watching the video version I have a box of remotes you know it's often in the background it's like a little wooden box then you'll see like four or five maybe 10 remotes sticking up because that's how many remotes I have in here I mean LED lights and the TVs and all these other things and it gets complicated because the ceiling fans which I also put in Home Assistant one of them when you power it on with a smart plug the fan doesn't come on it just has power you have to grab your remote and then turn it on and that's annoying because when I hit you know the smart plug it just come on I don't want to have to press a button on the remote so that's when we got to the conversation you're like yeah you can actually just buy an IR Blaster and program it with the remote codes and it could do all that for you and sure enough it works so basically the IR Blaster is something that you add to your network your Wi-Fi network and then Home Assistant is able to pick it up and then what you do is you train the IR Blaster but there's many remote codes as you want any device you want there's a video I followed on YouTube that was made this annoying process stupid simple to the point where I just blindly did what the person did and shown on the screen and sure enough it absolutely worked so I went through every remote I programmed every button and this is the downside you have to do this one button at a time so if you have two TVs in the same room you have to set the power button for one program that set the power button for the other program that and then the up arrow then the down arrow then the left arrow then the right arrow and it gets really tedious because you're creating a script behind every button but the fan only has a few buttons like maybe four turn on turn off circulate on circulate off speed up speed down so then I create an automation that waits five seconds after I hit the smart plug presses the power button it waits four seconds or so and then it turns on circulate and then it cranks up the speed and that's I was able to do that with the IR Blaster and then I was able to program the television and my monitor you know my actual computer monitor has a remote so now I can turn on the computer monitor with home assistant and access the menu and do everything without grabbing the remote so I did some initial testing and it works really really well so that was a great tip and it actually enabled me to get rid of some of the things I had on my dashboard that I didn't need Yeah, it's just a nice little simplicity there for I thought it was cool when it was a discussion me and Jay had of why do you have a box of remotes that led to him ordering a device and getting it all working so there's really so much you can automate with it that's what we wanted to share with you on this I think it's so it's such a directly related to our the topic of HomeLab in general and automating all the things and you being in charge of the automation you hosting your own cloud at home that's really what this just such a nice alignment there but nonetheless leave some comments and send some feedback for us on this topic because we like hearing from you on it we have a few more things planned we're working on that are going to be back to some of the more technical things so we just didn't have each of those topics quite ready yet but do check out Jay's recent videos on the series OpenStack or OpenChip OpenStack and OpenChip is part of it too Yeah, OpenChip is part of it too Yeah Yeah, absolutely well we do have one question we can answer real quick do you recommend using the latest kernel in Proxmox, Jay? The question I think is better asked is there a feature that you want to utilize that's the reason to use a a newer kernel if you're asking about performance improvements I mean there's always going to be performance improvements I'm not sure if there's going to be anything you'll notice but when it comes to servers I'm not a fan of swapping out kernels unless there's a compatibility issue or maybe a bug that a newer kernel version fixes another thing with a newer kernel version is that if you have a newer motherboard you might not even have a choice because hardware support is tied to it so if you install something and then find out like you have no Nick you do because you're looking right at your network card you know what exists it's not a figment of your imagination but when you go on your server it's just not an interface that's there and that's often because that network card might just be newer than the kernel was in that case you have no choice you have to use a newer kernel and I don't know if that's why they provide the newer kernel but I wouldn't doubt it because Debian is notorious for having really old kernels with hardware compatibility that leaves a lot to be desired so even Debian users will use Debian Backports to get a newer kernel much in the same way in Proxmox you could do the same so I would say if you have a reason or something that's not quite working go ahead and try it but if everything is working I would just leave it well enough alone that's what I would say about that in Broke don't fix it another another question that was asked is where did I put the IR blaster it's in a temporary location right now but what I plan on doing is installing it right in the ceiling just having it kind of poking out of the ceiling so it's kind of looking down and then it can get to everything so being line of sight means that you are not going to install one IR blaster and be able to use it in every room of your house you will have to have one in the den if you want one there you know in your office or wherever they're not super expensive but also money doesn't grow on trees so you want to make good use of the ones you have but if you have a lot of devices in one room then it's a good candidate or automating that but you will need multiple ones if you especially if you have different floors different rooms so it has to be line of sight but in the ceiling I have a drop ceiling so I could just you know just carve a little hole in the ceiling tile just poke it down it's easy and that way it's right there easy to access if I need to unplug it or reset it which I still haven't yet had to do but that way I could see everything without maybe my monitor bouncing the signal off and not getting to the TV which would be annoying so we're a fan in my case yep absolutely all right well thank you for joining us hit us up at feedback at the HomeLab.show and we're looking forward to seeing you next week absolutely take care oh Home Assistant high availability there's a fun topic I was hoping we wouldn't miss that one because the acronym be HAHA HOME ASSISTANT HIGH AVAILABILITY we need to make that an actual term if it's not already maybe it already is yeah I heard of it but that's pretty funny yeah we're definitely HAHA mode for Home Assistant I like that all right thanks everyone