Someone donated a beige PC tower from 2004 at my Store the other day. Surprisingly late for beige, as the typical computer colour by that stage had sharply shifted in favour of black - as evidenced by the image results when searching for pc tower and then the year 1999 through 2005 shows!

My plan is to use at least the case for the beige PC machine I’ve gradually been putting together, I won’t use the motherboard as it does not have an ISA slot - unfortunately that lack is a dealbreaker for a DOS gaming machine due to it being required for the audio card. There are also some leaky caps, resolvable but not fun…

So, the biggest news in the Apple world right now is Tim Cook announcing his departure as CEO. I guess he felt it was the right time to begin winding things down - he’ll be at Apple for many years still in the reduced but important role as executive chairman, I’m sure. He did an incredible job over the last 15 years, Steve made the right choice in terms of a reliable and sensible custodian of the Apple brand and company. Tim has always been a logistics guy rather than an engineer or designer - not a bad thing, he has run a tight ship at Apple and built things up massively. It will be interesting to see the difference with the John Ternus era though as I think he’ll take more risks with design, and will slowly make his mark rather than any big immediate changes.

But I will miss Tim’s cheery and classic “Good Morning” at the start of the Apple Events!

Currently listening: Pierre de Maere - “Je pense à vous”

The YouTube algorithm suggested last week that I might be interested in this video of Macworld 2007 which shows Steve Jobs onstage immediately after the famous iPhone announcement keynote. I was just out of shot to the right when this was filmed - I looked through my photos and found I had taken ones with the same people (other than Steve of course!) in them - weird to see it from another angle. Unfortunately, the only photo I have of myself and Steve he had bent over from the stage to shake someone’s hand, so he’s hidden behind me. I’m sure someone somewhere has a photo with both him and I in it!

Currently listening: Home Front - “Quiet World."

I saw Project Hail Mary last night at the cinemas, and it’s my favourite film this year so far - something pretty special will have to come out before the end of the year to top it, I’d say!

It manages to combine the spectacle of planets and spaceships with a touching story with all the human emotions, I’m trying to be vague here as spoilers would be a crime… Glad it is doing very well, Hollywood needs to remember that not every film has to be a remake or part of an existing franchise :)

Currently listening: Marvin Gaye - “Piece of Clay”

I mentioned recently a really nifty project called BirdNET-Pi (we need more positive uses of AI like this, please!) and last weekend, I set it up. The microphone was just a cheap one to get things started, but it is working quite well - it has detected 35 species! Now, I do think some detections are false positives, but see below a screenshot of this morning for example. Lots of happy feathered wildlife :)

Currently listening: Miles Medina - “hiphop and rnb mix at Japanese lantern shop l The Shoten 011 l city pop r&b chill” - These Login.jp_ mixes are all great at the moment!

Went by everyone’s favourite meatball dispensary today on a hunch, and sure enough the Kajplats range is available at IKEA, despite not being up on their website yet!

I bought 4 of the brighter version of the standard bulbs, a fancier filament bulb, and also one of the Grillplats smart power plugs (also not on the website yet).

I’m guessing the bulbs and the power plugs arrived later than the other new Thread/Matter smart devices as they get connected to mains power rather than battery power or a USB power adapter, and so require compliance testing in terms of meeting Australian standards, etc.

I have set up the filament bulb so far, which took a bit more work than I’d expected - I ended up setting it up in Apple Home, putting it in pairing mode, so that I could then set it up in Home Assistant. It’s not an “any colour” bulb, but you can adjust the colour temperature and the brightness level. Finally meant I could get rid of the Wiz app and integration.

I’ll set up the other smart bulbs and report back in the next week or so :)

Last night I watched “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice”, which was enjoyable and funny - some of the scenes with the other hitmen reminded me a bit of the humour of “The Big Hit”. The pairing of Vince Vaughn and James Marsden worked well, and there were a bunch of smaller roles and bit parts with familiar faces - Keith David, Dolph Lundgren, and Stephen Root (That’s my stapler!) amongst them.

This week I have been rethinking a few things with my setup, I have switched back to Safari from Orion and from 1Password to the built-in Passwords app due to how much more reliable and better integrated it seems to be - I’ve been using 1Password since about 2010, so not something I do lightly. I am also trying out the built-in Notes app rather than Tot…

In other news, the Mac Pro is no more! With the MacBook Neo being released this month as well, there are now three laptop and three desktop models in the Mac family. Remarkable how similar the simplicity of the line-up is to the “product quadrants” concept (see below) Steve Jobs showed over a quarter of a century ago - time flies…

Currently listening: Login.jp_ and Barry Can’t Swim - “house mix and yakitori with Japanese uncles l Barry Can’t Swim l The Shoten 014 l chill disco”

I had a chance today to get some hands-on time with the MacBook Neo, the Citrus colour-way specifically, and I really like it! The best way to describe it is that the machine feels “fun”.

I prefer the old school physical click of the trackpad, the keyboard is great despite lacking backlighting, and overall the machine doesn’t feel cheap, despite being at such a low price.

It’s truly incredible that the chip that drove the last flagship iPhone is capable enough to run a Mac, but here we are.

It will be interesting over the next few years to see how much Apple‘s marketshare changes in terms of computers… I think the Neo may only be the beginning.

Currently listening: Tinypuppetsound - “TPS // Red Room Series Vol.01 / French House Mix / DJ MAD MAESTRO (매드 마에스트로)"

A very cool project I came across recently is BirdNET-Pi, which runs on a Raspberry Pi and uses a microphone and AI to recognise bird calls. It then presents a grid heat map (see their example screenshot below) of the different bird species, giving you a fascinating insight into your local environment.

I don’t have a spare Raspberry Pi that can run it at the moment, but I am planning on ordering one soon as it’d be interesting to know how many bird types are nearby - I do hear the occasional Little Corella, Currawong, and Sulphur-crested Cockatoo in my area, as well as more common birds.

Currently listening: Ryan James Carr - “Hold It Down EP”

It’s very cute, it does have some compromises, but really impressive in terms of price point - I reckon it’s going to do some big things for Apple in terms of market-share. I was never a fan of the 2015-2017 MacBook, but the Neo looks to be a better thought out machine, and a great option to recommend to people wanting a cheaper Mac.

If only there was an orange model!

Currently listening: St. Paul & The Broken Bones - “Sushi and Coca-Cola”

I’ve been waiting on the new IKEA smart lightbulb “Kajplats” range to launch in Australia, and I’d say they are close now (month or two?) as the “Trådfri” range now come up as “Last Chance” on the IKEA website…

I’m planning on getting 4 of the standard ones to replace some entertaining area lights we have - those are the last smart devices in my house that aren’t directly set up through Home Assistant, and also one of the filament globes to replace a feature light we have.

Currently listening: Andrew Weatherall - “Music’s Not For Everyone Dub Special, Vic Bar, Glasgow 2017”

I knew when I first saw the Maclock that people would use it to create awesome mods - and here is a wonderful one! “This Does Not Compute” used the casing and a Raspberry Pi to turn it into a “real” tiny, tiny Macintosh :)

Currently listening: Milkblood - “Lead You Down (Teletubby Buddy)" - Such a catchy tune…

Today I set up a couple of smart smoke alarms at my place, they’re the new Sensereo MS-1. I had been waiting for literal years hoping a company would come out with a smart smoke alarm designed to fall back to being a “dumb” smoke alarm if needs be, and this unit looks to be exactly what I have been after. Inside are two seperate batteries, an integrated one for the smoke alarm that will last its entire usable lifespan (7 years), so it will still function as a warning device even if the other battery for the “smarts”, which lasts 2 years, runs out.

In Australia, as far as I’m aware, our smoke alarms have to be mains connected these days, so I’m running these in addition, not to replace the existing ones. Having these means if I’m away from home I will be better placed to know if there’s a smoke or a fire.

Set up was fairly simple, there is a typical QR code for pairing the unit via Matter, Home Assistant happily added it and within a minute or two it was all configured. After that, I physically mounted the units, all done. I’ll post an update if I run into any issues longer term, but my gut feel is these will be low effort and reliable, exactly what you want from this product category!

Currently listening: C’hantal - “The Realm (Love in D Minor Mix)"

Over the last few years here in Australia, there’ve been some stunning evenings of the Southern Lights out on show, and I’ve managed to miss it every time!

In an effort to change this, I was looking at the Aurora page of the Australian Space Weather Forecasting Centre (Part of our Bureau of Meteorology), and noticed that they have a publicly accessible API for their Aurora alerts.

That got me thinking - surely that would mean an integration could be built for Home Assistant… After a brief search, I found someone had created one! :)

I applied for an API key via the previous link and it arrived straight away (Well, not quite - I applied three times and the first two times I never received anything, so worth trying entering email addresses from different providers if you find yourself in the same position). Now in the section of my dashboard that shows the conditions outdoors, I’ve set up two little cards showing if there’s a current “Aurora Watch” notice, which has up to a 48 hour lead time of whether there are likely conditions soon for Auroral activity, and one for if there an “Aurora Alert” in effect, which is when “space weather activity favourable for viewing aurora is in progress”, as they put it. I configured them to only appear when active, hence the below Home Assistant screenshot showing “Edit” mode.

Now I am better placed to actually get to witness this natural marvel next time it occurs (I hope!).

Currently listening: Hey Lover - “Daughters of Eve”

Speaking of automations, I’d connected my dishwasher to a smart power plug quite a while ago with the intention of having it send me an update whenever a load finished, but I had not managed to build something that could do so in a reliable and timely manner.

Thankfully, someone has built and released a custom integration for Home Assistant that promises to do just that!

Here is a YouTube video about it.

And here is the integration itself.

I set this up before I’d even finished watching the video, now to see if it will learn the cycles correctly, assuming it does I may well set it up for my washing machine and dryer as well :)

Currently listening: John Carpenter - “Assault on Precinct 13 Theme”

One “Smart Home” feature I’ve tried to set up a couple of times but never managed to have working how I’d like is a simple and reliable way to know when there’s something in the letterbox… Seems like a simple problem to solve, but bear in mind the letterbox made of thick brick with a metal door, in combination with it being far enough from the house to give most sensors a hard time. Plus what kind of sensor should I use - motion, vibration, etc?

My next attempt will be using a “ThirdReality Zigbee Vibration Sensor” that I’ve ordered, and I’m thinking I will have it attached underneath a piece of corflute cut to the size of the bottom of the inside of the letterbox. Will be switching off the alarm on it, no need to freak out the postie of course. I’ll update things with how successful the setup proves to be!

Currently listening: Hypnotone - “Ai” (1991)

The new IKEA smart home range is a bloody good deal! They’re also compatible out-of-the-box with Home Assistant due to supporting Matter.

I bought a bunch of the Bilresa buttons (only $9 AUD each!), some of the Myggspray motion sensors ($12 AUD), and the Alpstuga Air Quality sensors (a bit pricier at $49, but much, much cheaper than similar options) and they’re all working really well.

So, moving across all of my smart home devices to Home Assistant was one of my major tasks over the holidays and I’m essentially done, and I have almost finished recreating the automations I’ve built over the years. There’s plenty of refinement and tweaking ahead (it’s always an iterative process to cover edge cases), but overall I am happy with how it’s looking.

The idea with having everything in Home Assistant is it allows for it to be the real heart of my smart home, previously I was limited in terms of control and automations within Home Assistant when I had devices that were only in Apple Home. I’ve set Home Assistant to expose most devices back to Home, so I still have the benefits of the simpler front-end and voice control that brings.

With the Bilresa buttons, I bought those to replace the Flic buttons I’d been using for years, as the latter were not supported well in Home Assistant. The Flic buttons also use coin cell batteries, and I’d never been happy with the flimsy physical construction of the casing - twist open and close them a few times and unfortunately you’ll have little bits of the plastic tabs coming off, I found. Although the Bilresa buttons are quite a bit larger, the concomitant durability and fact they take rechargeable AAA batteries more than makes up for it.

The Alpstuga Air Quality sensors support detecting CO2 levels, which I had been wanting to monitor, particularly in bedrooms, as well as PM2.5, temperature, and humidity.

Overall, really impressed with the feature-set and abilities of all of these devices, especially for the price. I look forward to when the new IKEA smart lights begin to arrive in stores, shouldn’t be too far away.

Currently listening: Young Original - “Mr. Sandman” A Retro Jazzy Living Room Cover

Back next week! Hope everyone’s 2026 is going well so far :)

I spent the last week camping, mostly just relaxing and reading the last 2 books of the Fold series by Nick Adams, and the Dark Galaxy Trilogy series by Brett Fitzpatrick. My enjoyment of the latter was tempered by the sheer number of spelling mistakes (generally incorrect homophones), so many I almost wonder if it is to deliberately watermark the text to later work out the source of pirated copies?

The weather was great, not too hot, not too cold, and it was good to unwind and “touch grass” as they say. In terms of wildlife, we saw many crimson rosellas, a wallaby, a fox, a bunch of bunnies, a few lizards, a koala with a baby, as well as a massive swarm of bees - thankfully the latter was headed away rather than towards us.

Now I am home again, so on with the changes I’m making to my smart home setup, the main one is setting all of the devices up through Home Assistant directly, so I can take full advantage of the greater control and automation it allows for. I’ll be making another trip to IKEA soon, as there are more sensors I’d like to purchase.

Happy 2026 everyone!

On the strength of how happy I was with the Aqara Smart Lock U100 I recently set up and blogged about, I got the Aqara Smart Doorbell Camera G410 to partially replace an OG UniFi Access Starter Kit I’ve had for over 5 years. I’d never been happy with it in terms of the performance - there always seemed to be too long a delay when people would ring the doorbell at our front gate.

So, now all I’m using that kit for is to unlock the gate only, using a Home Assistant integration to expose that ability to Apple’s Home app, which not exactly the cheapest/simplest way to achieve that, but at least it is reliable and fast!

I’m happy so far with the Aqara doorbell camera, but I do feel the plastic mount is a little flimsy and the unit is only held in place with a single Phillips-head screw located behind a rubber stopper on the side - far too accessible in my opinion.

I’ve also continued working on my Home Assistant dashboards, here’s a taste:

Currently listening: MICROMECHA - “Underwater Quest (Atmospheric DnB/Ambient Jungle/Liquid DnB)"

I recently ran into a strange issue with the “Zigbee Home Automation” integration I use in Home Assistant to let me use a bunch of Aqara, IKEA, and other sensors. Seemingly randomly after a reboot, the integration refused to load, and after a bit of troubleshooting and a couple of days of frustration, I ended up restoring and beginning again from scratch.

Whilst this was an inconvenience, I took this opportunity to make a bit of a fresh start - and in fact, I was also able to decommission Homebridge altogether and just have Home Assistant look after all of those integrations instead…

Also, I recently had installed a Shelly Pro EM-50 in my fusebox, which means I have an entry in the Home Assistant dashboard with the wattage, as well as a nice graph showing our usage over the last 2 days. It replaced my now defunct PowerPal, which I never did manage to get talking to Home Assistant properly.

So, overall it has been a “one step backwards, two steps forward” kind of week. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been running Home Assistant for a number of years, this is the first time it has given me any grief, it has otherwise been rock-solid and well behaved! :)

Currently listening: Jungle DnB Selections - “Hardcore and Jungle 93-95”

Last week, I took advantage of a very good sale price and picked up an Aqara Smart Lock U100. I’ve been using it for a couple of days, and I am overall quite happy with it.

One nitpick is that where the deadbolt goes into on the door frame could do with a sensor to know it’s actually gone into the cavity within the strike plate. Without that, it reports the door as locked even just with the deadbolt extended in midair uselessly… One workaround I’m considering is, to have a door and window sensor on that door as well, and an automation that messages me when the door is locked but not closed.

A major factor in my deciding on this model is that it supports real keys or security code or fingerprint, as well as Apple Home Key - so I can use my iPhone or Apple Watch to unlock it, which is pretty neat!

Currently listening: wilt - “bite my tongue”

I have been playing this first person shooter over the last month or so, and it’s a lot of fun!

I loves me some retro games, and this one is very much a throw-back in style, humour, and vibe to such classics as Doom and Wolfenstein 3D (hence the name).

Worth a download, surprisingly it is free!

Currently listening: 5atu8ion - “jungle atmospherics - late 90s ambient / atmospheric / intelligent jungle / drum and bass mix”

I was going through my list of unfinished projects, and decided I would set up again a Meshtastic node. I first set one up a couple of year ago I think but didn’t really see much activity. This time around, there are a lot more nodes!

In simple terms, Meshtastic allows for text messaging between devices that is not reliant on the cellular (mobile) network or the Internet. As it is a mesh network, the data passes between each device (node) rather than a central point, so more devices there are, essentially the better the spread of the network. It sends the data over radio and it’s designed to use as little power as possible.

I flashed my Heltec v3 with the Meshtastic firmware (Kinda bonkers that such a low-level thing can be done through a web browser!), then set it up in my roof space. It’s currently using only the stubby antenna it comes with, has no casing around the PCB, and is plugged in via a USB-C to USB-A cable hooked up to a USB power adapter. Now that I have seen there is much more activity, the next steps will be to 3D print a case for it and to properly mount a better antenna that I already have. Hopefully running this will mean that I can use in my local area the portable units that I have and the signal will be better propagated through the node I’m now running at home. Currently listening: Paeta - “Charcoal Noise EP” - This EP reminds me of playing Wipeout Pure on a PSP back in the day :)

Having ordered and received one of these last week, I am sure of three things; this is just the cutest tiny Mac I’ve ever seen, people are going to come up with some awesome mods and projects using the casing, and lastly; the fruit company legal ninja team are about to nuke it from orbit…

Currently listening: Matia Bazar - “Elettrochoc”

Last night the new show “Pluribus” was released, and having seen the first two episodes, it’s even better than I had hoped!

I love sci-fi that is more about thought-provoking scenarios and what it means to be human, rather than “dumb” action scenes (unfortunately, the former is relatively rare). This show is asking similar questions to “A Clockwork Orange”, in terms of free-will vs. morality and happiness…

Definitely recommend it, and I’m looking forward to next week’s episode already!

Currently listening: Hélène Vogelsinger - “Forgotten Futures /// ( 5 / 7 ) /// Slow Returning”