dervjd
I use an AirTag on my e-bike - there’s quite a few hidden mounts out there that look like normal rear reflectors or slot in between a water bottle cage and the bike frame. It’s also trivially easy to pop the AirTag open and remove the speaker so it can’t beep.
I bought my AirTags before there were any compatible third party options, but the non-Apple AirTags don’t have the UWB chip inside and don’t support the precision finding feature which would also make them more difficult to find.
Almost anything you do on the internet (or local network) depends on DNS functioning correctly. DNS can get complex quickly - multiple servers (caching/authoritative/recursive) and protocols = lots of opportunities for something to be misconfigured. Cached entries in particular can be a nightmare if something gets outdated - it takes time for an update to a DNS record to propagate to all the other DNS servers on the Internet. All kinds of other random services etc depend on DNS records being correct and DNS working. When there’s an issue it’s not always immediately apparent that a DNS problem is the root cause, leading to lots of time chasing your tail/tearing your hair out trying to figure out what the heck broke.
Looked into building a DIY NAS a few years ago, but decided to buy (a Synology DS1618+) instead. I'm sure I could've saved a few hundred rolling my own, but having purpose build hardware + commercially supported software is worth the cost if it's data that you care about (versus something like storage for 'linux iso files').
I actually had an issue a few months back where my storage pool suddenly degraded and went read only. Was able to send a full diagnostics/log dump to Synology, and their support engineers took over to diagnose the issue. If I rolled my own, I'd be the one spending hours either figuring it out myself while stressing about losing data, and/or rebuilding entirely from my offsite backup.
Zigbee/Z-Wave plugs have been rock solid reliable.
If you have the space, older HP Enterprise printers are absolute tanks.
I have a Synology DS1618+ that uses the Intel Atom C3538, and run a few other services on it (AdGuard/Sonarr/Radarr/Sabnzbd etc). Just looked at the performance history, and CPU utilization seems to sit around 5-10% with a few spikes to 40-50%.
I bought a HP Z620 off of eBay for $500 in 2019. Spec'd with 2x Xeon E5-2680 @2.7GHZ & 96GB of RAM, and had a 1TB SSD. Bought a RX570 graphics card, and away I went.
It's been an absolute pain in the ass: heavy, huge, tempermental, and sucks an enormous amount of power. Idles at 250-300watts just sitting at the login screen. My home office temperature goes up by several degrees when it's on.
It's also noisy, but not from the fans. There's noticeable coil whine/high pitched sounds when the computer is not idling. You probably wouldn't hear it over the background noise in a normal office, but you definitely hear it at home. And of course it sounds like a rocket when the fans are going full blast, which I'll admit is kind of fun.
Reliability has been a crapshoot - motherboard died and I had to source another from eBay. Pretty sure one of the RAM sticks is dying too - every few months it crashes hard (with an error screen mentioning a memory issue) but HP's hardware testing tools find nothing. Upside: very easy to take apart and replace the motherboard - everything is modular and slots out.
Software wise - all kinds of weird driver issues, especially with power management. Sleep mode usually crashes the machine. Of course none of the drivers have been updated in years, and Windows 11 isn't officially supported. ESXi works well enough after some BIOS tinkering - could not get GPU passthrough to work, and some of the system sensors aren't detected. Bare metal Windows 11 install works after some minor registry changes, but not officially supported.
The most irritating part of this tale is that I didn't buy this to be my daily driver.
I've always had a home server, and thought it would be fun to have the extra CPU/RAM power on tap to spin up VMs with reckless abandon. Well after all the issues with the Z620, I ended up buying a Dell OptiPlex Micro with 32GB of RAM & an i5-10500T. It's the size of a book, cost about the same as the Z620, is silent, sips power, and has been dead reliable. Granted, it's not as powerful - the E5-2680 has a 12,500 passmark score (and there's two of them) versus the i5-10500T's 10,319 passmark score. However this has never actually been an issue for me.
Tldr: There's a reason these dinosaurs are cheap. Power hogs, noisy, unreliable, and a giant hassle.
If you go this route, definitely buy the Android app FullyKiosk. It will let you lock the tablet to the HomeAssistant dashboard, automatically recover if something crashes, etc. I have it set up to use the built-in camera & motion sensor to automatically turn on the display if someone walks up to it or touches the tablet, and automatically turns the screen off after a few minutes of no motion.
The only issue with the Ikea shades is that they can't be cut - so they'll only work for you if your window is the size of shades they carry. None of the Ikea sizes worked for me, I ended up taking the measurements and just ordering custom cut shades from a company called Select Blinds. A little more expensive than Ikea, but the quality does seem a bit better.
If you want to get creative, you could create a custom dashboard and put an old iPod touch/Android device in kiosk mode and use it as a remote touch panel control for your home theater (or anything else in HomeAssistant).
I have two Lenovo M8 tablets ($100/each) that I'm using as home control panels - super convenient and rock solid. https://imgur.com/a/f0aNTRq
Example: I have some cheap Govee LED strip lights behind my TV for ambient lighting. HomeAssistant can detect when my Apple TV (or Samsung smart TV) is on and automatically turn on the lights for me. I don't have to reach around the back of the TV to try and find the little button to turn the lights on (or remember to turn them off).
I can also control both my TV and Apple TV through HomeAssistant. It's not exactly the most polished/straightforward, but you could definitely string together some automations - something like a "movie night" button that dims the lights, turns on the TV, switches to the appropriate input, and cues up a file. For me that's more hassle than it's worth.
- AdGuard for DNS blocking.
- HomeAssistant for all of my smart home stuff.
- Confluence for my wiki (back when you could get a $10 license, and yes I know it's overkill/unnecessary pain).
- Postgres (for Confluence)
- Nginx for reverse proxy.
I also have a Synology NAS (DS1618+) with a bunch of 10TB drives. The stock Synology apps are pretty decent and the entire package is polished compared to using something like FreeNAS. I use the built-in Photos app to manage my photo collection, ActiveBackup handles backups across all my PCs, and the Synology Drive software replaces Dropbox for me (complete with the ability to share a file via a password protected link). I run a dockerized version of SabNZBd/Sonarr/Radarr as well right on the NAS. Synology's CloudSync utility copies my most important files to a Backblaze B2 bucket.
I have the NAS connected via a 10 gig NIC for the NAS and a cheap Mikrotik 10 gig switch (with a gigabit uplink to the rest of my network). Combined with a QNAP Thunderbolt to SFP adapter for my MacBook, it's more than fast enough to use like local storage, including running VMs.
I also put a basic 2-bay Synology NAS in the basement, and everyone's laptops are set to back up via Time Machine automatically.
You'll get far faster transfer speeds, more ports, charging (and at full speed), proper display output (dual 4K/60hz) and better components/reliability. The CalDigit TS3 Plus[1] is what I've used for several years - first with a 2019 Intel MBP and now with my new 2021 M1 Pro MBP. It's pricey compared to a USB-C dongle, but rock solid.
You can also search AliExpress for “fanless pfsense” and find lots of options for less $$$.
For APs, you could also check out the Cisco Small Business line. Their 240 is the same hardware as some of their enterprise access points, and pretty trivial to set up.