I've been running Home Assistant with a mix of devices for a while now, and the Matter/Thread/Zigbee question keeps coming up. Here's how I think about it, and what I'd buy today.
Wi-Fi is great for plugs and cameras but terrible for coin-cell sensors. Here's why Zigbee sensors run for years, and how to add a Zigbee mesh to Home Assistant.
Tricknowtech quietly rebuilt its site this June and moved to a shorter domain, tricknow.tech. Here's why I keep using it for side projects.
A build log: unlocking, rooting, and re-flashing a spare Moto G34 5G with LineageOS to turn it into a permanently-installed Android Auto brain that runs YouTube, Netflix, and any other app on the car's factory display.
A full build log of turning a 172×640 touch strip display into a clock, voice assistant, alarm/timer hub, and push-notification device — including every hardware quirk and bug fixed along the way.
A weekend spent digging through fifteen years of old drafts and dead links turns into a longer meditation on how much has quietly changed since this blog started.
I finally emptied the drawer of dead phones and tangled cables I've been avoiding since 2019, and thought about why I couldn't bring myself to recycle any of it.
I finally killed my 63-tab habit by replacing every browser tab manager I've ever tried with a plain text file and a cron job that emails me a guilt trip every morning.
A weekend spent cleaning out a decade-old bin of mystery cables turns into a mini audit of old hard drives, an embarrassing 2012 blog draft, and a home network held together with static IP guesswork.
A late-night scroll through fifteen years of unfinished blog drafts, a hosting migration scare, and why 341 abandoned posts dont bother me as much as I thought they would.
A dead external hard drive sends me down a rabbit hole of old blog drafts, bad 2013 predictions, and a long-overdue reckoning with my actual backup habits.
A messy drawer of old external drives forces a reckoning with fifteen years of digital hoarding, and a decision to stop trusting my own backup habits.
