Whitney Krape

Category: iOS

  • Kasa/Tapo Issues with Home Assistant (and in general)

    Kasa and/or Tapo are not showing devices in Home Assistant and sometimes they aren’t staying connected to the iOS apps.

    So far Kasa devices have stayed out of the way and occasionally being able to start the switches remotely is helpful. With Home Assistant I’ve started to set timing to the switches for waking up or turning off lights but one of the power strips just refuses to authenticate in Home Assistant. (Even though other items in the same account auth?)

    At the moment don’t have an answer. Tried the Tapo app, which is kinda worse than the Kasa app, tried removing and readding, all the standard items.

    Updated 2025/11/13

  • Jellyfin for Music so far…

    While I bought a perpetual Plex license ages ago, I haven’t tried it for music yet. I opted to try Jellyfin first out of curiosity and see how easy it would be to get going in about 1 hour. From installing Jellyfin (on a non-LTS Ubuntu) to adding media, installing an iOS client, and playing music has come in just under that.

    Main issues so far:

    1. The official Jellyfin app doesn’t keep playing music on an iOS when closed.
    2. Tried Finamp briefly, worked, but no Carplay.
    3. Moved to Manet Music (which has a paid tier for Mac support) and so far working overall.

    Might try Plex music to see how it compares. Being able to call out tracks for a toddler on a roadtrip would be a north star to aim at for sure. So far, good.

    Updated and Retried on iOS and Ubuntu 25.04 2025/11/07

  • Moving MacOS local iOS backups for maximizing space

    Ditching all cloud services is not easy considering just how convenient so many of them are and how much space some of these services can take. Backing up a phone and tablet, particularly and iPhone and iPad Pro can take as multiple terabytes and often Mac’s have smaller primary storage. (I wonder why Apple…) Fortunately with a USB-C drive and a symlink, you can get basically unlimited storage for backing up devices.

    (Obviously update the paths for your set up as needed.)

    ln -s "/Volumes/DockedOrbit/PhoneandPadBackups/Backup" ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync

    Updated and Retried on MacOS 26.0.1 11/05/25