Episode 16: Packing the Homelab

What we cover

• Alex drops the news: the house is under contract and the family is heading back to England in early November. So how is he going to keep up his homelab?
• Housekeeping and Home Assistant: holiday gaps ahead and Frenck's PR to fold HACS into core as a first-party plugin.

First up, Stephen walks us through a day spent digitizing his company's logo for an embroidery machine, where every part of the file has to be told how to stitch. He explains the fight to get a fill that looks full and still has crisp edges, how thread direction changes the way light hits a 3D-looking design, and how feeding Claude the machine's manual helped him get this far.

Next, Alex shares some big news: after 18 months of winding down his self-hosting setup, his house is under contract and the family is heading back to England in early November. He explains how he's using Hermes, Telegram voice notes, and an Obsidian Base to build a plain-text inventory of every box for UK customs and insurance. Geoff compares notes on Homebox, and the conversation turns to what self-hosting looks like when electricity costs double and the basement is gone.

After that, some housekeeping. The next couple of months may bring longer gaps between episodes, and confirm the show isn't going anywhere. We also cover listener email about Geoff's episode naming, the Silo devs merging his PR, and the JetKVM team stopping by the YouTube comments.

Finally, we turn to Home Assistant, where a pull request from Frenck would fold HACS into the core project as a first-party plugin. We talk about why so many installs already rely on HACS, what the new name implies, why the reply about the old "Store" name landed so well, and why paying community developers is sometimes the right call. We close with the unglamorous side of emigrating: batteries you can't ship, 110V standing desks, and amplifiers.

Tags: home-assistant, hacs, moving-abroad, self-hosting, obsidian, hermes, homebox, inventory, proxmox, homelab

Links

• Home Assistant Marketplace PR - https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/183502
• HACS - https://github.com/hacs/integration
• Obsidian Bases - https://obsidian.md/help/bases
• Obsidian Headless Sync - https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-headless
• Homebox - https://github.com/sysadminsmedia/homebox