Category: Secrets & Hidden Features
The settings vendors bury, the automations nobody talks about, and the integrations most people never find. Every post in this category reveals something genuinely useful that takes real digging to uncover.
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I Replaced My Smart Display with a Tablet Running Home Assistant: Here’s What I Built
When my Lenovo Smart Display finally gave up, I didn’t replace it with another smart display. Instead I mounted a Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE+ running Home Assistant in kiosk mode. What started as a like-for-like replacement turned into something that does more than I ever expected: local voice control, chore tracking, UniFi doorbell alerts,…
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What Your UniFi Cameras Can Actually Do in Home Assistant
Most people buy security cameras to record. I use mine to trigger automations. In this post I’ll walk through how I’ve wired UniFi Protect into Home Assistant to handle package deliveries, doorbell alerts with live snapshots, backyard presence detection, and keeping tabs on Clarke — all locally, all without a subscription.
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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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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…
