Category: Issue Tracking

  • Mach-E Monitor 12v Notification with Home Assistant

    While there is an official fix for Mach-E’s 12v issues there is a Ford Pass app (unofficial of course) for Home Assistant that allows you to track and set a notification for the 12v battery. (Along with a host of other things.)

    The login process is not super easy but once added the level of integration is excellent and, best of all, includes a readout of the 12v status. From there, setting up a automation triggered by the battery level is fairly straightforward. At the moment, I have it set to notify if the level drops below 40%. Usually the battery cycles around the %60 level, not usually dropping much below there so %40 seems like a good buffer.

  • Battery Status Aggregation in Home Assistant

    Smart Batteries have their issues but being able to monitor them in Home Assistant is convenient and mostly works well. (Yes, another option is a smart shunt.)

    Fortunately, as usual with Home Assistant, there is an awesome plug-in via HACS, the Home Assistant Community Store, for all these bluetooth BMSes via BMS_BLE-HA.

    Once the batteries are showing in the BLE Management, you can then create a helper to combine the status of these. Now, granted, if these batteries are series and paralleled correctly their charge states should stay very close but this is helpful for a quick look. Also this could be set up to notify you if the voltages or charge states do drift.

    Updated and Retried on Home Assistant 2025.11.3 12/03/25

  • Ubuntu 25.10 Remote Desktop with Fixed Password and Full Screen Window (VNC alternative)

    Stop: This doesn’t work. Unfortunately on further testing, the keyring doesn’t unlock without interacting via monitor/keyboard.


    This feels unnecessarily difficult. While ideally you interact most servers via CLI the reality is there will be some visual interaction needed for some systms and currently Ubuntu 25.10 does not seem to have easy headless management with x11 gone. Sure you might be able to rip out the keyring but that doesn’t feel good. Annoying. Will keep testing and following up.


    Starting from a reinstall of Ubuntu 25.10 on the N100 Mini PC, more on this interesting little PC later, the script that resets the password works a treat though I don’t have it running automatically.

    There are 2 options in 25.10 Remote Desktop and Remote Login. Now it seems like Remote Login should be what we need, it’s password does not change, but as of this post that login is not working for me whether I have it enabled with Remote Desktop or not. Will dig into that and see if there’s a bug report already.

    Remote Desktop Password Reset Script

    Again credit to LarkinZero for the password updating script. For now, running this on connect. This system will be mobile so having a secure password is a good idea. Just running this via SSH works well.

    #!/bin/bash
    
    SCHEMA="org.gnome.RemoteDesktop.RdpCredentials"
    LABEL="GNOME Remote Desktop RDP credentials"
    USERNAME="abc"
    PASSWORD="123456"
    EXPECTED_VALUE="{'username': <'$USERNAME'>, 'password': <'$PASSWORD'>}"
    
    echo "Step 1: Clearing old credentials..."
    secret-tool clear xdg:schema "$SCHEMA"
    
    echo "Step 2: Storing new credentials..."
    echo -n "$EXPECTED_VALUE" | secret-tool store --label="$LABEL" xdg:schema "$SCHEMA"
    
    echo "Step 3: Verifying stored credentials..."
    RESULT=$(secret-tool lookup xdg:schema "$SCHEMA")
    
    if [ "$RESULT" == "$EXPECTED_VALUE" ]; then
        echo "Success: Stored credentials match the expected value."
        exit 0
    else
        echo "Error: Stored credentials do not match the expected value."
        exit 1
    fi

    Full Screen

    At first, I over-complicated this thinking there needed to be virtual monitor or a dummy plug but really, one setting.

    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.remote-desktop.rdp screen-share-mode extend

    Not sure why that’s not set out-of-the-box. Without that setting, the RDP connects, is blank, and disconnects. With that setting, all works as expected.

    Updated and Retried on 25.10 11/21/25

  • Hide the TimeMachine SMB to avoid more permissions issues

    Pointing out a key element in the SMB code posted before.

    [smb-name-for-timemachine]
      ...
      valid users = timemachinename00, timemachinename01
      ...

    For the valid users, be sure to:

    1. Create SMB users for each separate system.
    2. Don’t include wider SMB users. If you accidentally click into that share in Finder on OSX, you’ll end up messing up the permissions for any other SMB you have loaded.
    3. If you change users or shares you’ll probably have to delete the old timemachine file and start again. You might be able to fix permissions but probably not worth going down that path.

    So far the setup is working (along with so many other services from the same N150 powered Ubuntu) really well and well worth the 2-3 hours of setup and refining times.

    Updated and Retried with Ubuntu 25.04 and MacOS Tahoe 26.0.1: 11/19/25

  • 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

  • Nevermind, Immich on a shared N150, 70k files in 1 week

    With 70k+ photos and movies coming into immich; getting all new thumbnails, and organization I thought it would be months before the limited Intel N150 would finish processing but it may just be weeks. In fact, the library was usable almost overnight. Around 20k iCloud files came in about 2-3 hours. It seems like the RAW photos and video are taking the most time, as would be expected.

    What is more, the search already is producing great results.

    Need to revisit all the numbers but so far, impressive speed, and UX is great. Not doing everything standard though. We have iCloudPD pulling in images rather than using the phone backup but will go into more detail later.

    Updated and Retried on iOS and Ubuntu 25.04 powered by an N150 and 16 GB RAM 2025/11/10