Notifications in Home Assistant, But Smarter: The Script Pattern You’ll Wish You Used Earlier
Posted inSmart Home

Notifications in Home Assistant, But Smarter: The Script Pattern You’ll Wish You Used Earlier

Tired of copy-pasting notify.mobile_app_* actions across dozens of Home Assistant automations? In this post I’ll show a simple, scalable notification pattern that saves time now and frustration later: one reusable script per person (phone, work phone, tablet, whatever) plus group scripts for things like “the whole family”. You’ll learn how to pass message, title, and optional metadata cleanly, why the data object must always be a dictionary (and how to avoid the dreaded “Got None” error), and how this approach makes device changes painless because you only update notifications in one place. If you’ve ever replaced a phone and had half your alerts break, this setup will feel like a small superpower.
Building My Ultimate Home IT Rack
Posted inGeneral

Building My Ultimate Home IT Rack

Introduction For years, my home network was housed in an IKEA Besta cabinet—a budget-friendly solution that worked but had its limitations. The components sat loosely inside, with cables running everywhere, and the network was managed by an unmanaged switch and a FritzBox modem/router. It was functional but far from optimal. You can read about the journey of creating the cabinet to upgrading it in the two linked blog articles I wrote here and here. This year, I finally took the leap and upgraded to a proper wall-mounted 19” 15U rack, fulfilling a long-time dream. This new setup improves manageability, reliability,…
Posted inOnline & Digital Smart Home

Addicted to HomeAssistant

My Three-Year Journey with Home Assistant: The Brain of My Smart Home Three years ago, my journey into the world of smart home automation started with a simple problem: my wife and daughter sometimes forgot to turn off the hallway and bathroom lights. We use Philips Hue lights, and while they offer plenty of convenience and customization, they lacked a built-in timer function to turn off after a set period. In my quest to save energy and streamline my home’s operation, I started searching for a solution—and that’s when I stumbled upon Home Assistant. What started as a fix for…