Bayesian sensors in Home Assistant
give you one reliable presence signal by fusing weak ones: phone Wi-Fi, GPS zones, motion, power draw, and more. The bayesian platform doesn’t ask “is this one sensor on?” It asks “given everything I can see right now, how sure am I that someone is home?” The result is a presence system that tolerates dropouts, handles sleeping occupants, and stops the lights clicking off while you’re still on the couch.
Hands-on experience with AI, self-hosting, Linux, and the developer tools I actually use
Hands-on experience with AI, self-hosting, Linux, and the developer tools I actually use
Better Presence Detection with Bayesian Sensors in Home Assistant
Should You Move from Zigbee2MQTT to Matter in 2026?
Matter-over-Thread gives you one standard that works across Apple, Google, and Amazon. But Zigbee2MQTT still wins for power users who want deep local control over old hardware. In 2026, run both: Matter for new buys and energy gear, Zigbee for battery sensors and the long tail of devices that won’t ever get a Matter firmware update.
What Is Matter and Why Does It Exist?
For nearly a decade, the smart home was a patchwork of rival ecosystems. A Philips Hue bulb worked fine in Apple HomeKit, but pairing it with Google Home meant jumping through extra hoops. An Amazon-branded device wouldn’t talk to an Apple TV at all. Brands had to pick a platform alliance and live with it. Buyers paid the hidden cost every time they bought from a brand that didn’t play well with their hub of choice.
Home Assistant AI Voice With a Local LLM: What Works in 2026
Home Assistant AI voice control with a local LLM as the brain is practical in 2026. No Amazon, no Google, no cloud. The Assist pipeline already handles the plumbing: wake word, speech-to-text, a conversation agent, and text-to-speech, all on your own hardware. Setting that up is the easy part. The hard part is picking a local model that calls Home Assistant’s tools without guessing. The loop also has to be fast, or it will never feel like a real assistant. This guide covers both: the 2026 stack, the models the community actually trusts, and the latency budget that makes it work.
DIY NAS Comparison: Raspberry Pi 5 vs. Intel N100
The Intel N100 is the better DIY NAS choice in 2026 if you plan to run Plex or Jellyfin, want ZFS, or need more than two drives. The Raspberry Pi 5 still wins for low-power, always-on file storage where idle power cost is what counts. The right pick depends almost entirely on what you want the box to do.
Why Build a DIY NAS in 2026? The Case Against Synology
Synology and QNAP have spent the last few years getting harder to recommend. Newer Synology units reject non-Synology drives. Those rejected drives work just like the approved ones. The DSM operating system has changed too. It used to be a handy management layer. Now it’s a closed platform that pushes cloud services you didn’t ask for. A Synology DS423+ costs about $500 with no drives. A DIY N100 build with four SATA ports runs under $200.
Implement Dark Mode in Vanilla CSS (Zero JavaScript)
You can build a solid dark mode using only the prefers-color-scheme media query and CSS Custom Properties
(variables). This CSS-first approach gives users a flash-free theme switch. It also keeps your site’s code clean, light, and free of JavaScript.
Why Avoid JavaScript for Dark Mode
Most dark mode tutorials reach for JavaScript to toggle a class on <body>. It feels like the obvious fix. You add a button, read a preference from localStorage, and apply a class. It works well enough in demos. But in production, on real hardware and real networks, this approach breaks in ways worth knowing about before you commit to it.
Self-Host Blog Comments with Remark42 (Privacy-First)
Most blogs reach for Disqus on day one. It takes about five minutes to set up. What you don’t see at sign-up is the deal you’re making. Disqus is free because it monetizes your readers. Every person who loads your comment section gets tracked, profiled, and served ads. They never agreed to it. That’s just the business model behind the embed script you pasted into your template.
Remark42 changes the equation. It is a self-hosted, open-source comment engine built in Go. It ships as a single Docker image. It collects only the data needed to run a comment section, and nothing more. This guide walks through the whole setup. You’ll deploy Remark42 behind Nginx with HTTPS, wire it into a Hugo site, set up moderation, and keep your data safe with automated backups.