Home Assistant: The Ultimate Setup Guide – a Step-by-Step Tutorial

Home Assistant is absolutely my favorite Raspberry Pi project of all time. It provides a framework for automating your home and controlling all of the various IoT devices that we all have lying around our homes these days. My own Home Assistant server for example not only controls a bunch of different lights around my home, but I have also …

How to Disappear Online

Online privacy and security are critical components to ensuring that your personal data isn’t leaked all over the Internet every time you surf the web. Your personal data is a valuable commodity for companies such as Google, Facebook, and others that sell your information to advertisers for profit. And on the nefarious side, your personal data can be used by …

Cloudflare Tunnel Easy Setup

Cloudflare Tunnels is an AWESOME service for home users and businesses alike. But what is it exactly? Cloudflare Tunnels is kind of like a VPN connection in that it’s a secure way to access resources on your internal private network from the outside world. So for instance, say you have a Synology NAS device that has a local GUI interface, …

Definitive Guide to Hosted UniFi 2021

Update/Release notes: *** Guide created 1/20/2021 – I will keep this up to date as packages/versions change! This is the Definitive Guide to Hosted UniFi – NEW for 2021.  In this guide, we will set up a UniFi controller running on an Ubuntu 20.04 hosted server using Vultr (I have confirmed that all of these steps work fine on Digital …

streisand vpn

Create Your Own Personal VPN Proxy with Streisand

By now you’ve probably heard a lot about protecting yourself online with a VPN Proxy. You’ve probably even heard the names of some of the top VPN Proxy providers – NordVPN, TorGuard, Tunnel Bear – and my personal favorite Private Internet Access…a service I use daily, and highly recommend (if you’re interested, here’s my PIA affiliate link – much appreciated!). …

Definitive Guide to Hosted UniFi

THIS GUIDE IS OUTDATED!! Be sure to check out the Definitive Guide to Hosted UniFi 2021 – all of this same info, but updated for 2021! ———————————————————————– But…if you’re feeling nostalgic, go ahead and keep reading. *** Updated 4/25/2019 – Updated Step 18 to use OpenJDK-8 instead of Oracle’s Java 8. *** Updated 8/15/2019 – Ran through this entire setup …

UniFi Controller Installation on Vultr

*** THIS GUIDE IS NOW OUTDATED – Check out the Definitive Guide to Hosted UniFi instead! ————– Or continue below…though it’s a total waste of time. ———- Vultr is a great hosting platform that is very similar to Digital Ocean.  I have heard a lot of really good reviews from folks who use Vultr for their production systems, so I …

Long Range Dead Drop

This was a fun project.  I recently ran across a YouTube video from a channel that I really like – the Cyber Weapons Lab, aka Null Byte.  In this video, they discuss how to set up a Raspberry Pi as a dead drop using a downloadable Raspberry Pi image called PirateBox.  A dead drop, in espionage terms is a method …

Secure UniFi Controller

*** THIS GUIDE IS NOW OUTDATED – Check out the Definitive Guide to Hosted UniFi instead! ————– Or continue below…though it’s a total waste of time. ———-