My Underkill Home Network


A complex graph with dozens of devices connected by a tangle of coloured lines.

There's an absolutely delightfully bonkers post doing the rounds called "My Overkill Home Network" - which is a look into what happens when a computer geek goes feral and stuffs as many Internet connected thingamajigs in a living space. We're talking professional grade, rack mounted, doubly redundant, over-specced, equipment. Overkill is underselling it. I wondered how my home network looked in comparison. A few years ago I was complaining that routers which limit users to 128 WiFi devices…

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Adventures in home automation - Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 2


Screenshot of a website with loads of toggle switches.

They say that The Best Camera Is The One That's With You - the same is true of Raspberries Pi. As much as I'd love a 4B, they seem permanently sold out. So I dug through my scrapheap of old tech and resurrected an ancient Pi2. It's old, outdated, slow, with limited RAM, and has a bunch of much-abused GPIO pins. But it works and - crucially - is still supported by Home Assistant OS. Well... ish! The official Home Assistant installation guide for the Pi says that you can use a: Raspberry…

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There's no HTTPS for the Internet of Things


An error message in the browser warning of an unsafe SSL connection

Me being grumpy and stupid again. I have an IP Camera on my LAN, I want to connect to it via HTTPS. I can't. Why is that? Why do this? I have a username and password to access my IP camera. And my TV. And my lightbulbs. And all my networked gadgets. If I try to enter the passwords on a modern browser, I get this error message: It is now an accepted fact that data should be encrypted during transport - even on a trusted network. I have a modest home network of several dozen gadgets -…

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