I renamed every automation in my house and found four bugs
Four years of ad-hoc alias choices, fifty-six automations, one sitting to rename them all — and four real bugs I'd assumed were working fine.
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VOLUME I · 06 DISPATCHES
Notes from the
engineering
margin.
An occasional journal of reverse-engineering, home automation, and whatever else declines to yield to the obvious solution. Published when the work warrants it.
When the router dies, the house reboots it
A twenty-line automation replaced every 'have you tried turning it off and on again' conversation in my house.
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Honey, what if we painted it all black
How one evening, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, Next.js, and a Hostinger VPS became a private reimagining studio for exactly one address.
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Cracking a pool pump's Wi-Fi protocol in an evening
How we reverse-engineered the DEWENWILS / ECO Plugs protocol and built a local Home Assistant integration — with Claude Code as the co-pilot.
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What a four-year-old Home Assistant config has taught me
An audit of my own Home Assistant install — the patterns that earned their keep, and two habits I'd break if I started again.
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Three VLANs, one household: how my home network is actually laid out
Why my smart house lives on its own VLAN, what the three-network split actually costs, and the firewall rules that keep it from breaking Home Assistant.
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