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Iain MacLeod

Update: Home Assistant Blueprint - Advanced Motion Detection

home assistant Featured

Update: Home Assistant Blueprint - Advanced Motion Detection

Optimize Home Assistant blueprints with dual sensors, switches, and automation logic. Helpers simplify conditions, boost reusability, and avoid clutter. Real-world 'Mode' helper controls lighting, climate, security. For HA enthusiasts seeking clean, scalable setups.

How I Use My Private Domain for Email with ImprovMX, Mailgun, DynuDNS, and Ghost CMS

How I Use My Private Domain for Email with ImprovMX, Mailgun, DynuDNS, and Ghost CMS

Managing your own email on a private domain is a rewarding way to personalize your online presence. In this post, I'll walk through my setup, which combines ImprovMX for forwarding, Mailgun for sending and newsletters, and DynuDNS for flexible DNS management-including both wildcard and MX records. I'

Creating an OBS Plugin

Creating an OBS Plugin

I decided to combine a few of my favorite things for my own personal project: coding, streaming, and pool - this resulted in the drive to create an OBS Plugin to track 'matches' when I stream pool. Where To Start? Well I could start from the nothing, but

Plex Reverse Proxy Setup for Direct Access

Plex Reverse Proxy Setup for Direct Access

The following is a quick guide to using nginx and with a custom domain name to allow direct access to your plex instance and not have to rely on Plex Relay which limits bandwidth to 2Mbps. Dynamic DNS Service Use DynuDNS to setup your chosen domain e.g., myservers.com,

Home Assistant Blueprint - Advanced Motion Detection

Home Assistant Blueprint - Advanced Motion Detection

In this post, I'll guide you through creating a Home Assistant blueprint for a motion-activated light automation. This blueprint is designed to activate lights when motion is detected, with optional settings for brightness and color, and conditions based on time of day and/or an entity state. Tools

Playing with Pre-trained LLM Networks

Playing with Pre-trained LLM Networks

While my function is predominantly in the mid-senior technology space the market is consistently expecting, and requesting, management to have hands-on experience and to be able to function as Individual Contributors. On a personal note, I also like to understand the difficulties and tasks my teams face, so I am

Upgrading Portainer on Standalone Docker (Community Version)

Upgrading Portainer on Standalone Docker (Community Version)

It's time to upgrade your Portainer community version instance. If you followed my guide for installing Portainer in your docker environment, then you are good to move forward and follow the instructions for the upgrade process. These come from the official documentation, but I have some predecessor activities

Increasing the Size of My Ubuntu VM and Docker LV in Proxmox

Increasing the Size of My Ubuntu VM and Docker LV in Proxmox

I recently ran into some storage issues in my docker container, I was running out of space so none of my containers were playing nice - I should note, that proxmox didn't show any issues, as if unaware of the space the Logical Volume Docker was taking up.

Working with PopScope due to WillPopScope deprecation

Working with PopScope due to WillPopScope deprecation

I wanted to create a simple solution to prevent users of my application from forgetting to save their work and navigating away from entry and edit screens. When using ChatGPT, I was constantly told to use 'WillPopScope', but it's being deprecated, so it's not

Upgrading Gradle in Visual Studio Code

Upgrading Gradle in Visual Studio Code

I was having issues checking the signingReport for my application, I was trying to review all the SHA keys for my Android app so that I could implement Google Sign-In OAuth 2.0. The following code was creating errors: ./gradlew singingReport I decided it was probably best to upgrade my

Batocera Alternative - ChimeraOS

Batocera Alternative - ChimeraOS

I have been using Batoreca Linux for a few years now, and it's been great. Until the last 6 months I hadn't used Batocera for Steam or Epic games that much, but figured I'd give it a try so I could play Deep Rock

Evolving My Android App: Simple Recipe Manager

Evolving My Android App: Simple Recipe Manager

My Android application is in the Google Play Store. It's not a hit, it's not rocking anyone's world, and it hasn't had any marketing behind it. This was a simple pet project to keep my mind active and expose me to other

Exploring Flutter: Building an Android Application

Exploring Flutter: Building an Android Application

During my job search, I have been keeping myself busy with consulting and continual education—I can't sit with idle hands. I've been taking courses on AI and Cloud Computing, and consulting with various companies on their products, solutions, and approaches—I love to network. As

Mini Tower PC: Batocera Build

Mini Tower PC: Batocera Build

As mentioned in a previous post, I am a gamer in a household of gamers. I have recently been enjoying Steam games, a bit of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor to be specific (Ghost Ship Publishing have some quality games with solid game-play). With that said, I started thinking about trying

Docker in Proxmox: Migrating my Grav deployment

Docker in Proxmox: Migrating my Grav deployment

TL;DR: I am enjoying containerization, and not looking back: the simplicity of deploying, ability to make quick changes, speed of initialization, and the ability to checkout any news containers with ease. I have consolidated most of the services I had hosted on different VMs into my single Docker environment

Setting up Docker and Portainer in Proxmox

Setting up Docker and Portainer in Proxmox

Introduction In this journal I am going to discuss my steps in setting up docker in Proxmox v8.1.3. For this I will create a Debian container, specifically v12. My goal was to gain familiarity of deploying docker containers and broading my experience with virtualization. ** IMPORTANT NOTE:** If you

Unleashing the Power of Proxmox

Unleashing the Power of Proxmox

Introduction: In the realm of open-source solutions, Proxmox stands out as a versatile platform that empowers users to experiment and harness the full potentail of virtual machines. In this article I am going to provide an overview of the build I am using for a minecraft server, home assistant installation,

Miyoo Mini Plus - Retro Gaming Device

Miyoo Mini Plus - Retro Gaming Device

Introduction I'm an avid gamer, and have become somewhat of a casual collector in recent years. My collection centers around the systems and tiles I grew up with, it saddens me to think that one day we will be reliant on the cloud for gaming, physical media will

Access List with NGINX Proxy Manager

Access List with NGINX Proxy Manager

Continuing my journey with NGINX, I decided to investigate Access Lists, my goal was to provide fully-qualified domain names to access some of my self-hosted services, but with a catch. I wanted to allow access to several self-hosted services on my internal network without having to plug in an IP:

Using NGINX and DynuDNS Addons in Home Assistant

Using NGINX and DynuDNS Addons in Home Assistant

I have been using DynuDNS for some time, for the purpose of routing my external IP to a purchased domain name - with the added bonus of creating an SSL certificate for free via the Let's Encrypt feature built in. My goal was to have a publicly accessible