My front porch lights run on a timer. An automation turns them off every night - and for the longest time, that mostly worked. Then one night I noticed them on when they shouldn’t have been. At 1 AM I was walking past the window and the porch was still glowing, so I turned the lights off myself and promised to look into it the next day.

Looking back at the logs, the story was clearer than I expected: at the usual cutoff the lights turned off, exactly as programmed. Then, a few seconds later, they all turned back on. And they stayed that way until I turned them off.

Sometimes the interesting part of fixing something isn’t the fix - it’s the moment you realize you were wrong about the problem.

The one-button button

There’s a small smart button on a side table in the bedroom. The aim was simple: one press toggles the lamp plugged in nearby. That part worked fine. But I had a bigger question in mind - if this button proved useful, there’d be more of them around the house, so I wanted to know just how much I could get out of one.

Every so often the network throws a tantrum. This was one of those days.

Everything broke, sort of

It started as a typical “some things work, others don’t” morning. A few devices stopped talking, an add-on that keeps certificates up to date went into a crash loop, and the assistant I use to keep the home-automation setup tidy couldn’t reach out to do anything useful. Not a clean outage - more like the network had decided to be selective about what it allowed.

You’re on foogar.com - a small personal corner of the internet that mostly exists so John can keep a couple of email addresses alive. It’s a hobby domain with a hobby site, and it’s under no obligation to be impressive.

But it’s about to get slightly more interesting.

A funny idea

Some background: John runs a home-automation setup in south Mississippi. It watches over the lights, the doorbell, the thermostat, a robot mower, and a growing pile of sensors. It’s useful, occasionally fiddly, and very much a work in progress.