Yesterday, I finally got an electrician to install a Shelly Pro 3EM smart meter for me. So it was time to set it up right. […] https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2026/pure-local-solar-integration/ #Cloud #HomeAssistant #MQTT #Powercalc #Shelly #SmartHome #SolarFlow #Zendure #zenSDK

I just replaced the usage of Sentry.io with Bugsink (https://www.bugsink.com). For my purpose of error debugging, it’s more than enough. And it’s compatible with the Sentry SDK, so replacing it means just updating the DSN in the configuration, neat! And a huge bonus for me: Slack notifications […]

TIL: Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) in the newest firmware (8.2x) of my FritzBox is probably garbage. When set to “automatic” (which is the only setting aside of “off”), the network is super unstable between devices on the LAN/WAN and any other device. In both the LAN and the internet. Clear […]

I’ve recently discovered Open Archiver in a (German) YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXd2X7Ln_Vk), which allows you to archive your emails from various different email providers. It seems to be still a very new project, but it looks promising […] [Original post on kittsteiner.blog]

I recently wanted to move away from Apple’s Notes app, since it doesn’t allow storing the actual notes anywhere als than iCloud. So I started a journey regarding self-hosting my notes … […] https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2026/from-self-hosting-notes/ #Apple […] [Original post on kittsteiner.blog]

TIL (at 3 am): Upgrading Dovecot is not fun when the behavior changes a lot. Took several hours to get it running identical to before. But at least I could remove some old configuration parts. https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2026/dovecot-update-is-not-fun/ #Debian #DevOps #Dovecot #Linux […]

TIL: Defining a default value within register_post_meta drives you crazy if you no more aware of that you did it. It still persists, even if it is not in the database or the object cache. Found out around an hour later … 🥲 https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2026/default-value-in-register_post_meta/ […]

I had been playing with Grafana, InfluxDB, Telegraf and Prometheus the last two weeks and can now share my story of what I finally use to replace my Netdata instances and why. […] https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2026/migrated-from-netdata-to-prometheus-grafana/ #Ansible #DevOps #Grafana […]

Every so often, I read and hear that Apple is no more innovative because the devices look always the same (not the only reason, but let’s focus on this). I just don’t get why. Why it needs to change? I’m not against new, I’m just happy with my devices. iPhone: it works fine, would even love to […]

I used to use Numbers usually only to track my spendings for my side business to get a quick overview when doing my taxes. All the back and forth with Apple Creator Studio now let me change that. Now, I’m using InvoiceShelf to track the expenses there. It’s self-hosted and thus I’m in full […]

I recently stumbled upon the Proximity integration of Home Assistant as well as Traccar to track your devices. Until now, I used the iCloud3 v3 component to do such things. Time to compare them. […] https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2026/home-assistant-proximity-vs-icloud3-v3-vs-traccar/ #BigTech […]

I used to use Audible, because it was convenient and cheap for single audio books. Now, I migrated away from it by using Libation – a great project to download Audible content – Jellyfin for managing the audiobooks, and BookPlayer on iOS, the latter came through a suggestion from @simon […]

On the one hand, I use a rather classic local file structure to manage my documents, but also use Paperless-ngx to manage them (and especially for search). Thus, I want to keep my local structure, but also automatically upload the documents in Paperless-ngx […] [Original post on kittsteiner.blog]

I’ve updated my self-hosting slash page with some newcomers: Dozzle Joplin Wallos Check it out at https://kittsteiner.blog/self-hosting/. https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2025/new-self-hosting-projects/ #selfHosting #SlashPages #UnplugTrump

I used the Sunday morning to upgrade my Baïkal instance to version 0.11.0 (if you experience issues with the MySQL connection afterwards, make sure to add the new required configuration entry mysql_ca_cert to your config). And I also used it to enable […] [Original post on kittsteiner.blog]

Since I bought new RAM with double the capacity (32 GB now) for my TrueNAS, I had more room to try out new self-hosting apps. So, new on the blo(ck/g) (checkout https://kittsteiner.blog/self-hosting/) are: CO2MqttSensor Kaneo Keycloak Open Archiver […] [Original post on kittsteiner.blog]

After a very interesting (German) toot about a CO₂ sensor I also purchased such a sensor (TFA Dostman AIRCO₂NTROL MINI) and of course my goal was to have it as sensor within Home Assistant. Luckily, there already is a project to collect the sensor data via […] [Original post on kittsteiner.blog]

Yesterday, I stumbled upon VitePress via the Dovecot documentation and I like the design. Will it be worth to migrate my existing documentations from WordPress? We’ll see … 🫣 https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2025/playing-with-vitepress/ #Documentation #Dovecot #VitePress #WordPress

I just upgraded my TrueNAS from 24.10 Electric Eel to 25.10.0 Goldeye and already with the update step 25.04 in between I’ll notice the much more snappy UI. Needed to update the password of my SMB user, though. It seems that this has been getting lost […] [Original post on kittsteiner.blog]

My today’s achievement: updated comment colors of my theme in VSCodium for improved readability. Yes, you can adjust it yourself even if you use a custom theme. […] https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2025/comment-colors-updated/ #A11y #Accessibility #VSCode #VSCodium #WebDev #WebDevelopment

While searching for improving the way to display temperature and humidity in Home Assistant, I found a new way by using some custom cards. […] https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2025/new-combined-temperature-humidity-home-assistant-card/ #graph #HACS #HomeAssistant #SmartHome #state

Some nose is absolutely boop-able. https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2025/someone-wants-a-boop/ #Boop #Dog #DogsOfMastodon #MastoDogs #Nose #Shiba #ShibaInu

TIL: tmutil delete allows to add the -t parameter multiple times to delete multiple (old) backups at once: sudo tmutil delete -d /Volumes/Backups\ of\ Matzes\ M1\ Pro -t 2025-04-13-215640 -t 2025-04-21-095453 -t 2025-04-28-151733 Before, I used multiple […] [Original post on kittsteiner.blog]

Finally, I had the time to finish reading the Web Accessibility Cookbook by @matuzo. Have a couple to-dos to check for on my websites. Highly recommended: https://accessibility-cookbook.com https://kittsteiner.blog/blog/2025/web-accessibility-cookbook/ #A11y #Accessibility #Book

I couldn’t find any free plugin that allows me to receive Slack notifications when a new order has been created or updated in WooCommerce. So I created it myself: https://github.com/epiphyt/product-notifications […] [Original post on kittsteiner.blog]

Glenton Samuels commented the proposal for the future WordPress admin materials and surfaces and laid it down very clearly why using React for it is a bad idea. And I fully agree with it. Just to quote the conclusion, but it’s worth to read the full post […] [Original post on kittsteiner.blog]

I just switched from Transmit to ForkLift recently after the latter changed their SSH implementation from libssh2 to OpenSSH, making use of the default SSH configuration of your user. This was the main reason to switch for me, as we use a ProxyJump at work […] [Original post on kittsteiner.blog]

Time flies … When possible, the last few weeks I worked on the next big thing in Form Block: allowing you to store form submissions in your WordPress backend. Backend work is now nearly completed (only the delete function has to be implemented) and then […] [Original post on kittsteiner.blog]