Blog
Guides, reviews, ideas, and real experiences from a live smart home setup.
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Be Smart About Your Smart Home: Don’t Forget Your Z-Wave Network
Your Home Assistant backup doesn’t include your Z-Wave network. That’s a separate process entirely — and skipping it could mean resetting and re-pairing every device in your home. Brad Andrews walks through the exact Z-Wave backup process he uses across three controller migrations, none of which cost him a single device.
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The Blueprint: Locking Down Home Assistant With mTLS — So Hackers Can’t Even Find the Door
A login page is not enough protection. Anyone who can reach yours can probe it, fingerprint it, and hammer it. mTLS via Cloudflare Zero Trust fixes that, bad actors get a Cloudflare access denied screen before they ever touch your network. Here is exactly how to set it up, including the iOS profile install and…
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Be Smart About Your Smart Home: Setting Up Home Assistant Backups (The Right Way)
Setting up Home Assistant backups takes less than 15 minutes and could save you days of work. Brad Andrews walks through the exact setup he runs — daily automatic backups to a Synology NFS share and Nabu Casa cloud — plus how to restore when something goes wrong.
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HACS: Unlocking the Home Assistant Community Store (And Staying Safe While You Do It)
HACS is the Home Assistant Community Store, and it is where some of the best integrations and dashboard cards live. Here is how to install it, what I actually run from it, and the honest security conversation most tutorials skip entirely.
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Proton Drive, Docs, and Sheets Review: Is It Ready to Replace Google Drive?
Google Drive is convenient, free, and deeply integrated into everything but it also means Google can read every file you store there. Proton Drive offers the same cloud storage experience with end-to-end, zero-knowledge encryption baked in. I’ve been using it for photo backup, personal files, and Smart Home Secrets content. Here’s the honest review of…
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The Blueprint: How to Set Up a Cloudflare Tunnel for Home Assistant (Free, Secure Remote Access Without Port Forwarding)
Port forwarding your Home Assistant to the internet is a security risk most guides gloss over. Here’s how I replaced Nabu Casa remote access with a Cloudflare Tunnel for free, no open ports, and a foundation for locking things down even further with mTLS. Updated for Cloudflare’s current Zero Trust dashboard, which has changed significantly…
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Why I Switched My Entire Digital Life to Proton (And Brought My Whole Family With Me)
Already deep into your Home Assistant setup but still handing your email and passwords to Google? I made that same trade-off — until I didn’t. Here’s the honest story of why I moved my entire family to Proton, what it actually cost, what I gave up, and why the privacy-first mindset that drives a great…
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Be Smart About Your Smart Home: Why Backups Matter (And Why You Can’t Have Too Many)
You’ve spent months building your smart home — the automations, the integrations, the routines your family relies on without even realising it. But what happens when something fails? Brad Andrews shares why a layered Home Assistant backup strategy is the single most important thing you’re probably not doing properly yet.
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Proton Password Manager Review and Setup: A Password Manager Built for the Privacy-Conscious
I’ve used more password managers than most people know exist — TrueKey, PasswordBoss, Keeper, 1Password, PasswordState, Enpass, and now Proton Pass. Two years in, my whole family is on it. This is an honest review of what it gets right, where it still has gaps, and how it stacks up against the best alternatives.
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