Quentin Mayo

Category: Home Automation

  • A Jog, a Homelab, and the Cost of ‘Doing It Yourself’

    Another day, another jog, another chance to talk out loud to myself. It’s Monday, December 8th, 2025. I haven’t listened to my audiobooks or the SANS podcast yet, but life moves forward, so I’m moving forward with this goal of just talking through what I’m working on.

    Homelab Reality Check

    Lately I’ve been fooling around with my home server and Homelab setup. One thing I’ve realized: Homelabs are the biggest oxymoron when you’re trying to “save money.” It’s exactly like camping—you can do it for cheap, but once you scale up, it’s absolutely not cheap anymore.

    My Unraid server has multiple hard drives, and they fail randomly. Redundancy becomes a whole topic by itself. Before COVID, you could grab used 10TB drives for ~$80–100, which felt like a steal. Five drives, one parity? Boom—40 TB usable storage for ~$350.

    But in reality, once you start actually hosting things locally, you realize you need:

    • multiple drives
    • parity
    • cache drives
    • backup strategies
    • and constant troubleshooting

    Today’s issue: my cache drive stopped reading. I had just replaced the PSU with a Corsair unit and ran a parity check. Overnight one SSD just decided to quit. VMs broke, Docker broke, the whole thing went sideways.

    The SSD is officially dead. Now I’m debating:

    • Do I buy a new Samsung 1TB for ~$109?
    • A cheaper brand for ~$50–80?
    • Reuse a failing 240GB SSD just to limp by?

    It’s the endless Homelab question: fix it properly or patch it for now?

    Audiobooks, Habits, and Time

    It’s been weeks—maybe months—since I’ve opened Audible. When I lived in NYC, I listened constantly because I had an hour-to-90-minute commute on the R train.
    At 2x or 3x speed, I could get through 1–3 audiobooks a week.

    Now? With working from home and only driving the kids to school, finding listening time is tough.

    My plan:

    • Cut down music during workouts
    • Turn on audiobooks when driving
    • Mix in Udemy and training materials
    • Follow Atomic Habits: make good habits easier by putting them “in reach”

    It’s not impossible; I just need to build a new routine around my current life.

    Upcoming Events & Goals

    A few other things on my radar:

    Anime Convention

    It’s been almost 10 years since I last went to one. My kids want to go, so that’s going to be fun — a full throwback moment.

    Fitness

    I need to get back on track. I’ve been jogging again but want to rebuild consistency.

    GitHub Actions on Raspberry Pi

    This is my “because I can” project.
    I run a lot of security scanning tools for work, and having many self-hosted runners speeds everything up.

    Raspberry Pis:

    • aren’t power efficient
    • aren’t super powerful
    • but they’re tiny, quiet compute units I can scatter everywhere

    They’re perfect for automating repetitive workloads. Combine that with faster building through AI tools and I can really speed up my workflows.

    Short-Term Roadmap

    • Decide whether to buy the new SSD
    • Tighten up my Unraid setup again
    • Restart my audiobook habit
    • Prep for the anime convention
    • Deploy GitHub Action runners across a few Raspberry Pis
    • Keep working out consistently

    A lot going on, but doable. The real goal: stop locking up mentally and figure out how to keep moving while I’m doing more.

  • Home Automation Journey

    A while back, one of my colleagues mentioned Home Assistant. I didn’t pay much attention at first because I was using a tool called DRAC Board. Fun name—and I liked it because it gave me a clean dashboard view for things like my calendar. But as I started working on more personal projects, I realized DRAC Board was too limited. No JIRA integration, inconsistent support across Microsoft To Do, Google Keep, and other tools I used. And honestly, it hasn’t really improved much as a product. For five bucks a month, it did its job, but it wasn’t enough for the long-term.

    What really pushed me toward the home automation world was security cameras. With three little monsters—AKA my kids—running around, I needed visibility in the house while I’m working in the office. I had access to the cameras, but my wife didn’t, so I wanted a simple way for her to see what was going on in the shared spaces.

    I played with Home Assistant again and discovered that a lot of camera systems support RTSP streams. Even my little rinky-dink NVR could spit out RTSP URLs with the standard format (rtsp://username:password@IP/channel). Once I realized that, I built a nice dashboard where my wife and I can pull up the camera feeds anytime. And that alone made Home Assistant worthwhile.

    Integrations That Surprised Me

    As I dove deeper, I found that Home Assistant has integrations for other stuff I already own. For example, my Withings scale—the fancy one that tracks weight, BMI, etc.—has an API integration. So now my weight trend shows up on the dashboard too. It only pulls in one user profile, but that’s fine for now. I’m not buying another scale just to track everyone’s data.

    I also noticed you can pull in Xbox information. Since my kids often play using my profile, I can see what games they’ve been on. I haven’t tried Steam yet, but maybe that’s next.

    Next Steps for Home Automation

    I want to experiment with outdoor cameras next. The challenge is that I want all the features but I’m also really cheap. A lot of commercial brands either require subscriptions or offer limited functionality. And from a security perspective, I’m not overly concerned about digital locks being “weak.” Most break-ins aren’t Hollywood-style lockpicking. People smash windows, kick doors, or replay garage signals. So for me, it’s about features, not fear.

    Ideally, I want:

    • Fingerprint or phone-based entry for my kids
    • Cameras at entry points
    • Local + cloud backup of footage
    • A system that doesn’t cost a fortune

    I’ll keep refining it over the next few weeks.

    Fitness and Getting Back in Shape

    This year, getting back into shape has been harder than I expected. Not because my body can’t do it, but because my willpower keeps fighting for time against everything else. The funny thing is, when I was the busiest in my life, I was actually in the best shape. So it’s not a time problem—it’s a desire and consistency problem.

    I want to get back into jogging and lifting, especially after dealing with past shoulder injuries. Dance Dance Revolution is still my favorite workout, but it’s tough when the garage isn’t cleaned up (where I keep the dance pad). Sometimes the barrier isn’t motivation—it’s clutter.

    I used to do:

    • Push-ups
    • Crunches
    • Light lifting
    • Jogging
    • DDR or P90X

    And I could bounce back quickly. Now, with more responsibilities, I can’t just “go hard for 30 days” and magically reset. I need a slower, more sustainable ramp-up. Better eating. Smaller habits. Less “all or nothing.”

    Today I got outside and jogged a bit. It wasn’t perfect, but it was something. And right now, something is exactly what I need.

    Looking Ahead

    Over the next few weeks:

    • Keep improving the home automation setup
    • Start working toward getting outdoor cameras
    • Work on sustainable fitness
    • Drop a few pounds through consistency, not intensity

    Small steps, steady progress.