Migrating Google Home routines to Home Assistant became a redesign of simulated occupancy. Saved daily variation, phone-based presence, restart recovery, and explicit manual handoff make lighting more flexible without giving an AI responsibility for running the house.
An old Acer Chromebox becomes a separate backup and DNS node through remote agent administration. A tested restore validates the backup path, while retiring the old resolver exposes a hidden dependency in the local AI router.
Tuning Hermes to run fast against local AI on a two-node DGX Spark cluster. One unrecognized reasoning_effort setting broke Hermes tool calls, and context compression cut the turn time about 4x. Covers the config fix, the context ceiling, and the latency floor tuning cannot remove.
The local smart-home path moved from typed Hermes commands to real voice control, using a Pixel Tablet, Home Assistant Assist, Whisper, Piper, Android wake word detection, and Z-Wave lights on the ThinkCentre.
A routine homelab hygiene pass turned into a full infrastructure cleanup: Proxmox reboot validation, Uptime Kuma repair, Home Assistant Wake-on-LAN, router reservations, stale device cleanup, and one stubborn BIOS-shaped mystery.
The local router prototype became useful when Hermes turned off a real Z-Wave light through Home Assistant, after USB passthrough, Z-Wave JS setup, entity mapping, and one stale MCP endpoint got fixed.
Turning a local AI policy-layer plan into a static router prototype, with FastAPI, Proxmox LXC, local DNS rewrites, Uptime Kuma monitoring, Spark DeepSeek, and 5090 Granite fallback routing.
DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision-Exp on a dual DGX Spark cluster takes the broad local-agent benchmark lead, while Granite 4.2 no-think still wins the smart home slice that matters most day to day.
Three new contestants join the local agent bakeoff: IBM Granite 4.2, Poolside Laguna XS 2.1, and DeepReinforce Ornith 1.5. Granite 4.2 unseats Qwen 3.6 as the equal-weighted leader and dominates the one job that actually matters, Home Assistant tool-calling. Then a fourth run isolates a single variable, IBM’s default-on thinking mode, and finds it costs 10.8x the wall-clock time for no measurable accuracy gain on this battery. Plus: why the coding domain needs a harder replacement before round three.
A new local model gets validated by a dashboard feature built before it existed. A DNS outage traces back to two unrelated bugs. A deliberate reboot of the homelab’s Proxmox host finds a third bug neither fix would have caught.
A phone-friendly status page for a two-machine homelab, built in phases. Why it lives on the Proxmox box next to Home Assistant instead of the AI workstation, how it talks to Uptime Kuma with no REST API to speak of, and why the third phase, waking the workstation remotely, is still waiting on a cable move.
Episode 4 gives an agent real write access to Uptime Kuma, retires the last manually-copied secret files, test-builds Proxmox Backup Server in Docker (catching a build that silently deleted the very package it installed), and catches a Wake-on-LAN plan that was about to fail for a reason nobody had checked yet.
Episode 3 installs HACS and an MCP server entirely over SSH, chases a phantom outage down to a single stuck config value, and wires nine Uptime Kuma checks with Discord alerts, then fixes a cron bug and a false-alarm habit before publishing.
Five local models, six evals, one real job: run Home Assistant, a calendar, an investment portfolio, and a to-do list — all self-hosted, no cloud. Qwen 3.6 holds the crown, but only barely, once three full runs replace one. Meta’s six-day-old Muse Glimmer nearly took it. Hermes 4.3 finishes last twice over. The scores, the failure transcripts, the run-to-run noise, and the one safety-relevant nuance the numbers alone don’t show.
Episode 2 of the SmartThings-to-Proxmox series: hardening the ThinkCentre, wiring up Tailscale so a Coder Agent can SSH in and administer it directly, standing up the Home Assistant OS VM, Uptime Kuma, and AdGuard Home, and ending on a single page load that quietly fired 53 blocked ad-tech requests.
Kicking off a series on replacing a Samsung SmartThings hub with a self-hosted Home Assistant box. Episode 1: picking the hardware, fighting a Lenovo BIOS setting hidden behind a decoy, and the increasingly absurd path to actually getting an OS onto the machine when there wasn’t a single working USB drive anywhere in reach.