A couple of months ago our old single drive WD My Cloud Home NAS died. The HDD failed and even shucking the device and trying to connect with a SATA adaptor failed to read the drive. Thankfully nothing important was lost as that was all backed up off site.

My Home Assistant setup recently died due to the SDCard finally giving up after 3 years of continual use. Thankfully I had a relatively recent snapshot of my setup so getting up and running again was mostly painless. However this time I invested in an SSD and converting my setup to boot from that.

I recently purchased some Libratone Zipp Mini speakers that were on offer and wanted a way to control these through Home Assistant.

Our landlords installed a smart heating system into our apartment around 2 years ago. Consisting of a wall mounted tablet and some RF controlled radiator valves to allow us to control these on a schedule or via the control panel in the hall.

I recently purchased my wife a Lenovo IdeaPad Duet Chromebook as a replacement for her aging Dell laptop. Since she mainly using her laptop for surfing and light tasks it was a good choice from the reviews I read and at that price point.