My partner eats muffins from the top down. Sometimes, I’ve caught her just eating the tops off the muffins and leaving the bottoms.

You can do most everything Tailscale does with native Wireguard, it’s just a lot of work to manage any of what Tailscale does beyond the most basic. It’s a lot of convenience on top of Wireguard. If you just need a basic “I want my phone to easily get back to my home network” then I would probably stick to Wireguard (and maybe a GUI on top like wg-easy). If you want to do more complicated stuff, like link multiple sites, mesh routing between multiple networks, sophisticated user access controls, etc, Tailscale starts to be maybe be worthwhile. Or another solution, I personally actually prefer to use Netbird, which is basically similar.

One thing it does do that native Wireguard does not is it includes a relay server, so that if two hosts can’t actually reach each other directly they can still negotiate a direct connection or even fall back to using the relay server to communicate. This is useful if you’re stuck behind something like CGNAT or other networking schemes where hosts may not be able to have a publicly routable IP address.

Tailscale (and Netbird) also offer one extra convenience which is they both have built in reverse proxies that integrate with the VPN network they generate. Strictly speaking that part is separate from Wireguard; you can also do that yourself but it’s rather convenient. This lets you have publicly trusted TLS certificates and stuff for your internal sites and depending on how you use it can replace stuff like Cloudflare tunnels. So you can host sites without port forwarding.

FWIW I primarily use a native wireguard server with wg-easy for most of my VPN needs and I only really use Tailscale (actually, Netbird) for some specialized uses. Mostly replacing Cloudflare tunnels with something I fully control.

Best way to think about it is as an abstraction layer where you can make any computer anywhere talk to another one like they are on the same network without being. You can build networks however you want and it mosly just works. It became popular to do things like tie together multiple machines or networks in datacenrers or home or wherever and let them network together irrespective of the underlying isolation. At home people like to use it to let them access their home network and self hosted services on the go without having to expose anything to the Internet.

Under the hood it’s mostly “just” a VPN with some extra convenience and controls, but it made VPN networking a lot more convenient.

Is that a hot take? I see a lot of people saying this, including myself. Kubernetes solves problems at work, but is way overkill even for my moderately elaborate home setup that would cause more troubles than it solves. If people want to use k8s at home go ahead, but I don’t.

I agree that there is some value to obscurity generally, but Wireguard already evades port scans and fingerprinting. Unless a packet is signed with a known key, it gives no response to traffic, so scanners and fingerprinters see a closed port. You ISP can identify WG traffic while you are connected by inspecting your traffic, but random scanners won’t see anything. Look on shodan, you won’t see Wireguard.

I ended up building it myself, which may be the best option if you want to use other plugins. I have it set up in my own Forgejo with a CI configuration to auto build the binary and docker image. Forgejo let’s you also host container images, so I can just pull from the latest build wherever I need it.

Both those tools analyze service logs for suspicious activity and block based on patterns. If you aren’t hosting anything externally, they probably aren’t doing anything.

Crowdsec is probably more effective than fail2ban overall, but both are only part of a defense in depth strategy and are really last resort protection.

Why not just use a door sensor to tell when it’s opened?

Any smart lock should work on an interior door, you may have to drill a deadbolt but its the simplest solution. Switchbot and U-tec both make smart locks with fingerprints and excellent Home Assistant integration. Ubiquiti also sells magnetic latches you could install for access control if you’re in their ecosystem.

If you can give up on Home Assistant integration/smart features, however, there are oodles of push-button and even fingerprint door (without other connectivity features) knobs out there. Most of them are terrible quality and not secure but that doesn’t really matter to you and they are cheap.

Yeah but the problem is a LOT of common domestic door locks and padlocks are vulnerable to low skill attacks like raking or other simple bypasses that you can learn in a couple hours. The number of lock makers that cheap out and neglect even basic higher security features is shocking. Unless you really go out of your way and specifically go looking for a quality lock are you unlikely to find one with something like security pins and higher tolerances that resist picking.

I like it a lot more UI wise. It feels like the modern MS Office if the ribbon UI wasn’t awful and busy. Compatibility is extremely good as well. Has Nextcloud/standalone web version, desktop versions, phone versions. I haven’t used the phone app that much, but it seems good from what I have used.

Edit: I don’t know how well it handles Markdown, however.

OnlyOffice?

What would dual Z axes on the mini achieve? The existing cantilever design is plenty stiff in my experience, I’m skeptical you’ll get any significant increase in print quality or speed, and I suspect at the cost of having to fiddle around a lot tuning settings to get it back to where it started as the existing firmware has a lot of tuning for the mechanical behavior of the exisiting design. So, if you’re not happy with the mini as is, I would be looking at a different printer rather than a dual Z mod.

Having myself indulged in the temptations of homebrew 3D printer mods, I came to realize that not all mods out there actually improve performance, especially this type of serious mechanical overhaul of what is already a fairly sophisticated and optimized design. A decent part of the mini’s secret sauce is in the firmware, and this is going to break that.

I liked ddg browser and used it for a while, though I had to go back to Firefox for an unrelated reason (couldn’t get ddg browser to accept my private certificate authority as valid).

Tugtainer is pretty nice, and has a webui.

Previous 3 major release upgrades I’ve done were smooth, ymmv

If your purpose is long term archival you should probably be using M-Disc Blu-rays anyway, which are still actively made by Verbatim (and one other company).

Not entirely sure about the de-google’d version of the Home Assistant companion app, but I know the regular companion app uses Firebase (and whatever the Apple equivalent is called, I forget) to deliver notifications, and it still would using Telegram as Telegram also uses Firebase. Apprise is a bit different as it can use multiple backends. Regardless, there are multiple ways to do things. Ntfy iphone and google app do not route your data through a third party server. I self host the ntfy server on my own machine and domain and my phone connects to it and receives data. It will deliver notifications wherever I am, not just in my LAN. It also provides a nice UI akin to Pushbullet I can use to send myself stuff privately.

You can’t replicate all of what ntfy does with Home Assistant. There’s more to it than just delivering notifications, it’s the whole app frontend and persistent data etc. If it’s not clear to you what it’s for from my description you might have to go look into it yourself. Look at PushBullet, that’s most similar to what I primarily use it for.

Home Assistant notifications and almost all other notification services on phones actually route notifications through a cloud service like Firebase because Apple and Google try to railroad apps into their platforms. Ntfy lets you actually self host notifications without a third party, but also without killing your battery.

That’s not the main thing I care about, though. Mainly I use it as a self hosted replacement for PushBullet, to share links and files with myself across machines and do some light alerting for servers and stuff (e.g. TrueNAS errors). Some of that could he done with HA, but ntfy is just better for some other uses with stuff like its web ui.

Plus, apart from that ntfy is really easy to integrate with other stuff, like its easy to send a notification from a shell script or web hook so you can hack it into things that don’t otherwise support notifications (there are also lots of things that support ntfy natively, e.g. the arrs).

Actually Budget for finances, Nextcloud for everything office and organization, Home Assistant for home automation, paperless–ngx for storing and sorting documents, freshrss for news, ntfy.sh for notifications.