HACS offers great additions to the functionality of HA, but there are so many options it feels overwhelming. What are your favorite HACS?

This is surely common knowledge for some of you but I thought I'd share a story, as this just made me cringe

I never understood the point in the option to "run actions in parallel" I thought if I had a list of actions to complete, HA makes it through them almost instantly, and with the varying latency of each action they wouldn't complete at the same time anyways.

Then I tested my smoke alarm notification that I have had running for over a year.

It went-

If: list of smoke alarms detects smoke Then: Turn on the lamp next to my bed, then Send a notification to my phone.

I had made an error when setting up the lamp entity. (I made it full brightness on both scales, can only use one) this stopped the automation before the notification went out to my phone.

If it's important that the automation makes it to the end, run in parallel!

Talk about a false sense of security

A few years ago I turned a pine64 rock64 SBC into a kodi box, and saw immediate performance improvement over the stock Roku chip on my TCL TV when streaming from SMB. As always "better" becomes... ehhhhh I want more. I want to stick with an SBC because of power consumption on a box that I'm going to leave running 24/7. So my question is: What's the best price to video performance SBC out there?

I woke up this morning to a text from my ISP, "There is an outage in your area, we are working to resolve the issue"

I laugh, this is what I live for! Almost all of my services are self hosted, I'm barely going to notice the difference!

Wrong.

When the internet went out, the power also went out for a few seconds. Four small computers host all of my services. Of those, one shutdown, and three rebooted. Of the three that ugly rebooted some services came back online, some didn't.

30 minutes later, ISP sends out the text that service is back online.

2 hours later I'm still finding down services on my network.

Moral of the story: A UPS has moved to the top of the shopping list! Any suggestions??

I've been slowly moving access to my Self hosted services from multiple WireGuard VPN connections over to tailscale for that nice flat network feel. One thing that was holding me back from the switch was that I liked vpn'ing my internet traffic from my phone and laptop back to my network and into the PiHole to avoid ads/tracking when I was away from home.

Then I found the DNS settings on the tailscale admin console and everything lit up! I added the server that PiHole is running on as a nameserver and changed the global settings and BINGO! No ads!

Unfortunately.... A few days later when looking at my PiHole admin console I realized that the PiHole that I set up at my parents house for them was one of the biggest clients.....Not optimal.....

Is there a way to make an exception to the global DNS setting? Any suggestions? I don't want to remove their PiHole from my tailnet as it makes it much easier to maintain.

Can anyone explain these annoying outlier points from my zwave thermostat? This is from a honeywell thermostat, but before this I had a trane that suffered from the same problem. It happens with current temperature and humidity. It's not like its terrible, it doesn't mess with my automatons or anything, but when I want to look into my heating history it really screws with the scale

Can anyone help me pick out a budget friendly (sub $200) graphics card?

• Doesn't have to be current generation

• I won't be gaming at all on the PC

• Needs to run well on Linux

• Must run 3 monitors

• Biggest workout it will get is streaming security cams on one screen, full screen video on another.

• Power supply is only 295W and I'd rather not upgrade it.

Any help is much appreciated!