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Unexpected Linux Adventures

Home Assistant on Kubernetes on Raspberry Pi 5 (Alfred)

That old house with aging electrical wiring, where last winter we needed Continuous Monitoring for TP-Link Tapo devices to keep power consumption in check at all times, could do with a more versatile and capable setup, to at least partially automate the juggling involved in keeping power consumption within the contracted capacity.

Home Assistant should be a good way to scale this up, but what that old house needs in the first place is a 24x7 system, so here we go again to setup a brand new Raspberry Pi... enter Alfred, the new housekeeper.

Migrating UniFi Controller to Kubernetes

The old UniFi Controller and its required Mongo DB have been a bit of a hassle to keep updated while running directly on the host OS in my little homelab server, so the time has come to migrate this to the new linuxserver.io/docker-unifi-network-application on my little Kubernetes cluster on my new Kubernetes cluster.

Warning

Beware of outdated documentation, most articles out there like Install Unifi Controller on Kubernetes, are based on the deprecated linuxserver/unifi-controller, while others like setting up the UniFi Network Controller using Docker are using jacobalberty/unifi-docker which was quite outdated until recently.

In an old house with aging electrical wiring and a limited power contract, keeping power consumption in check is quite necessary and can be a bit of a challenge. Some appliances are very power-hungry for short periods of time, at unpredictable times throughout the day, while others are running constantly and add up to a baseline that quietly takes a chunk of the power budget.

A decent way to keep an eye on power consumption is offered by the TP-Link Tapo line of products, in particular their smart plugs with energy monitoring and temperature and humidity sensors. These devices are relatively easy to setup, reliable, discrete and not too expensive... although they do add up fast!

For all the smart features in these devices and the companion app, there is no way to have a panoramic view of aggregated power consumption broken down by device, or to configure thresholds based on the aggregated power consumption from all appliances. Such panoramic view was not hard to implement by building on the Continuous Monitoring solution previously built for monigoring computing resources (already monitoring temperatures and power consumption).

Monitoring dashboard for Tapo devices showing current and historic power use and temperatures

Starting a blog with mkdocs-material on GitHub pages

After about a year since starting a blog with Jekyll on GitHub pages, the time has come to step this blog's game up. Jekyll is good, but it makes copying text a bit hard sometimes (hard to see) and code blocks are lacking some features like showing file names and highlighting specific lines. These features, and more, are available in Material for MkDocs, another Markdown-based documentation framwork that looks really good!

Get Started with Material for MkDocs

For a tutorial, see Material for MkDocs: Full Tutorial To Build And Deploy Your Docs Portal.

For more inspiration, see also Beautiful Pages on GitLab with mkdocs.

Ubuntu Studio 24.04 on Rapture, Gaming PC (and more)

The time has came to update my main PC, which I use for gaming, coding, media production and just about everything, to Ubuntu Studio 24.04.

Considering Timing

Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS Released on April 25th but, as they themselves put it since it’s just out, you may experience some issues, so you might want to wait a bit before upgrading.

There doesn't seem to be anything particular scarey in release notes:

And my plan is not to upgrade in place; I like to keep the previous version around, just in case I need a stable system to fall back to.