I’ve spent 58 of my 60 years on this land. It’s more than just a property to me it’s home. This is where I share the ongoing work, the big projects, and what it takes to keep the homestead going.
Building out my upcoming homelab made one thing immediately clear: without a reliable homelab power protection foundation, a single 1-second grid flicker can turn an active virtual environment into a devastating mountain of corrupted file systems and lost configurations. Before…
Setting up a reliable Home Assistant irrigation system has been the main goal of this backyard project. Over the last few articles, I’ve shown how we built our square foot garden, installed a drip irrigation system, and started tying everything…
We’ve all been there: you open your electric bill at the end of the month, see a massive spike in cost, and wonder, “What on earth did we leave running?” I use Home Assistant as my energy monitor, and it…
We see a lot of SMS phishing attempts over here, but every once in a while, a text slides into our inbox that is so spectacularly, fundamentally broken, we have no choice but to step back and admire the sheer…
Welcome back to Part 3 of our Square Foot Garden project! If you missed the first two entries, we’ve already covered the installation and basic irrigation routing of our square foot garden. Today, we are diving into the nervous system…
The Home Assistant Matter Hub became my escape route from a persistent security headache. Every time I opened Home Assistant, an orange notification dot was waiting for me, usually tied to another failed login attempt from random IPs across the…
In the first part of this series, we detailed the construction of our raised garden beds, from assembling the galvanized faux stock tanks to the framing with 4×4 lumber (that serves as a decorative border, a protective mowing barrier, and…
I’m definitely not turning this into some kind of dedicated cyber security blog; that’s just not what we do around here. However, dealing with a recovery scam or helping people figure out things like the expn.pro Experian scam or the…
Update: Part 2 of this project is now up! Check out [Square Foot Gardening (Part 2): Designing an Automated Irrigation System for Raised Beds] to see how we trenched the lines, ran the plumbing, and built out the drip irrigation…
UPDATE: Right after publishing this story, the scammers doubled down. I was immediately targeted on Facebook by a secondary “recovery scam” bot trying to exploit the situation. [Read the new breakdown here] The sheer irony of running a recovery scam…
