From Coral to Hailo: Why I Finally Swapped My Frigate AI Hardware

From Coral to Hailo: Why I Finally Swapped My Frigate AI Hardware
I have been running Frigate for quite a while now. The Google Coral TPU has long been the "gold standard" for edge processing object detection. It’s efficient, cheap, and handles MobileNet models like a champ. But as my camera count grew and my patience for false positives wore thin, I knew I needed more horsepower. I recently pulled the trigger on the Hailo-8 AI Acceleration Module, and the results have been night and day. The…

Insulating the Chicken Coop – The Data

Insulating the Chicken Coop – The Data
Earlier this year, I took the time to insulate the walls of the chicken coop and cover the insulation with 1/4" plywood. I had hoped we could go without needing a heater in there in the deep winter, and luckily I was right. With Home Assistant tracking everything to InfluxDB and a Grafana dashboard to keep an eye on it, I can see that when all the doors are closed, it keeps nearly 10 degrees…

Goodbye Ring, Hello Privacy

Goodbye Ring, Hello Privacy
With it being ever more likely that someone could access Ring cameras or lock me out of access to Ring footage, I decided it was time to leave Ring for the doorbell cameras. I had two, one on the house, one on the shop. The shop one needed to go anyway, the only thing it ever did is let me know the grapes were getting too long. The front door was used constantly, so I…

Beyond the IP Address: Modernizing Homelab Infrastructure for Security and Scalability

Beyond the IP Address: Modernizing Homelab Infrastructure for Security and Scalability
In a growing homelab environment, managing services through raw IP addresses and port numbers quickly becomes a bottleneck for both security and usability, not to mention incredibly annoying unsafe browser warnings. My goal for this project was to move away from fragmented IP service access like 192.168.1.50:8123, and implement an internal routing layer. By deploying Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) in conjunction with Cloudflare, I transitioned my stack to a host-based routing model that provides encrypted,…

From Smart Bulbs to Skynet: The 2026 State of my Home Automation

From Smart Bulbs to Skynet: The 2026 State of my Home Automation
When I left Elastic, one of my goals was to dive deep into home automation and finally "level up" my setup. Looking back at where I started when we first moved to Graham, it’s almost comical. Back then, "Home Automation" was just a few Philips Hue bulbs and a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant that didn't do much. It was essentially a glorified light switch connected to Alexa. Fast forward to today, and the Raspberry…

Co-Writing Music with AI

Co-Writing Music with AI
I set out last week with a simple but slightly provocative question: Can I write a song with AI the same way I would if I hired a professional producer and songwriter? I didn’t want the AI to just do it for me; I wanted to see if we could collaborate. After five days of prompts, stems, and late-night sessions in Logic Pro, I have a finished track... and a massive identity crisis. Here is…

August 2025 – Photo of the Month

August 2025 – Photo of the Month
It's not the photo of the month because it's a particularly great photo. It's the photo of the month because my favorite photo I have ever taken is a Lily in Central Park. These two are amazing because I took the photo in my back yard.

Cedar Wall 1-day Build

Cedar Wall 1-day Build
The studio room has had a white block wall since we moved in. There was no power and I had no interest in drilling to mount anything so it really blocked my options in the room. I helped a friend building a studio and he had a few sound panels left over to give me. I wanted them on that wall, so it was time to tackle. I had one main concern. I didn't want…

Nova’s Fast dev API

Nova’s Fast dev API
Today's been about getting this thing set up properly. I'm not a developer by trade, but I've always been a coder. That being said, I consider myself a prototype developer, so my projects tend to be loosely managed. I wanted to grow this project up a bit, so I took a step back to think about how it's going to work and decided that I wanted to focus on an extensible API first. The Machine…

Nova Assistant: It was only a matter of time

Nova Assistant: It was only a matter of time
My house is definitely smart to the extreme. I have a lot of automation that runs all aspects of the house, security with AI, and dedicated servers for automation and AI. One example of how I have already wired some of these things together, is a Python service using Ollama & Llava as a false positive checker for Frigate. That being said, all of this private goodness is still connected to Amazon's Alexa ecosystem for…