HACS is built in now — and my hand-installs were invisible
Home Assistant 2026.11 leaves nothing of HACS to install. What changes, what breaks in templates, and why manually installed integrations do not show up.
Location
Across locations
What applies to all three homes at once.
9 articles
252 scripts later: what Claude could and could not do
Three flats, three instances, 252 tool scripts — built with Claude as a working partner. How the chain looks, and the one rule without which it does not hold.
Flatness was the proof — two lines, two wrong suspects
Two radio links, two months of measurement. In Kapfenberg the culprit was my own automation, in Merano the measuring tool itself.
For thirteen hours the shut-off hung on the cloud
A network outage, two new addresses — and the local path to both water valves was dead. Why fixed addresses matter most when you work locally.
What a radiator thermostat measures is not your room
Three homes, three ways to a radiator: tado over HomeKit, Shelly over Zigbee, and once no valve at all. What each gives you — and what none of them can do.
Your remote access works — but you have not proved it
Three flats, three answers. Why a successful request from home proves nothing, why bans never expire — and why one location has nothing at all.
Three cities, three data sources, one question: when do I leave?
Departure boards in Merano, Kapfenberg and Vienna. The same idea built three times — and three times I got it wrong in a different place.
Two masters on the same light
The Hue bridge automates by itself, even when Home Assistant is off. Use the same sensor twice and you will later wonder why the light goes out on its own.
The Raspberry Pi sat in a drawer for eleven months
Bought in September 2025, nothing achieved for a year. What changed after that was not the hardware — and the reorder date gives away the day.