From Digital Chaos to an AI-Powered Document Archive: My Paperless-ngx Setup
Posted inOnline & Digital Smart Home

From Digital Chaos to an AI-Powered Document Archive: My Paperless-ngx Setup

Turn your digital document chaos into a smart, searchable archive. Discover how I installed Paperless-ngx on a Raspberry Pi, connected it to my Synology NAS, and used native AI features to automatically classify, tag, and organise documents. With Home Assistant-powered one-button scanning and automatic email imports, managing our family’s paperwork has become easier, more secure, and remarkably hands-off. A practical look at self-hosted document management, AI automation, and reclaiming time for things that actually matter.
One Button Before Every Meeting: My Home Assistant Meeting Mode
Posted inBehind Solutions Consulting Smart Home

One Button Before Every Meeting: My Home Assistant Meeting Mode

Working from home means video meetings, demos and customer calls are part of my daily routine. So I built a simple Home Assistant meeting mode that I can activate from a button on my Stream Deck. One press adjusts my office lighting, switches on the video light, silences distracting devices and announcements, turns off the printer, and shows my family that I am in a meeting through Home Assistant dashboards and a red status light outside my office. It is a small smart-home automation, but it makes my home office noticeably calmer and my meetings much more predictable.
A Perfect Home Office Setup for a Solutions Consultant
Posted inBehind Solutions Consulting Online & Digital

A Perfect Home Office Setup for a Solutions Consultant

For a Solutions Consultant, the home office is more than just a desk with a laptop. It is where discovery calls happen, live demos are delivered and customer relationships are built through a screen. The perfect home office setup for Solutions Consultants should support clear communication, reliable demos, professional video calls and long working days without getting in the way. In this article, I look at the parts that actually matter: screen space, audio, camera positioning, lighting, ergonomics and network reliability. The goal is not to build the most expensive setup possible. It is to create one that helps you focus on the customer instead of the technology around you.
Making My Scanner Actually Smart: From Touchscreen Menu Hell to One Button, AI and Email
Posted inOnline & Digital Smart Home

Making My Scanner Actually Smart: From Touchscreen Menu Hell to One Button, AI and Email

I turned a frustrating multi-step printer workflow into a one-button smart home automation. Using Home Assistant, HACS eSCL scanning, a smart plug, Zigbee buttons, SMTP and OpenAI, documents are scanned automatically, intelligently named and sent by email or saved to Paperless. This post shows how the setup works and why it saves so much time.
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…
Yet another Home Office Setup
Posted inOnline & Digital

Yet another Home Office Setup

In the recent weeks and months during the pandemic, I have seen many people sharing pictures of their home office setup to give others ideas about what works in certain scenarios and benefit from the experiences of others. I would like to tune into this and share my current home office setup - everything from the desk to the computer and camera. My Usecase The ideal setup does not exist. But if it does, it strongly depends on what you do at your desk. In my case, I am in online meetings most of the day - presenting our software…
Posted inOnline & Digital

DIY NETWORK CABINET House Upgrade

Last year, I wrote an article about a DIY Network cabinet for my flat. This should be a central hub for all network connections and a nice clean space for all network devices such as routers, switches and NAS. This perfectly worked out while living in our flat but needed some adjustments when we moved into our house in late 2020. As you may remember, one central part of the cabinet was a 24-port gigabit switch. To get the cables to the switch I used a cable throughput and a switching board (which basically are double CAT5 connectors) on the…
Home Automation Part 2: HMIP Glass and Window Sensor
Posted inGeneral

Home Automation Part 2: HMIP Glass and Window Sensor

As mentioned in my previous post, I am working on home automation (mainly) with HomeMatic IP (HMIP). Well, and one gap I could find in their quite extensive range of different sensors was, that they did not have a glass breakage sensor - only window/door opening sensors. But because I wanted to secure all windows in our basement with both methods, I had to get creative. After a little research I ended up with these components: HomeMatic IP Kontakt-Schnittstelle 153149A0 HmIP-SCI (HMIM contact interface) costing about 30€ a piece.Abus Draht-NC-Öffnungsmelder FU7350W (Abus wire normally closed opening sensor) about 8€ a…