Whitney Krape

Blog

  • RPi 4, Lineage OS, and Victron Connect for Remote Control

    RPi 4, Lineage OS, and Victron Connect for Remote Control

    Recently had a problem with a Victron Controller and voltage spikes and it would have been really helpful to either alter the voltage settings or just disable the charge controller remotely for a temporary fix. Now, Home Assistant works as a monitor perfectly but, so far as I know, you can’t alter values via HA. (Will look into that more.)

    Turns out Lineage OS, via KonstaKangs excellent page, works a treat. You do need GApps to install repos like Litime’s battery monitoring, but the Victron Connect APK is available from their site.

    The setup isn’t perfect. The VNC connection is a little temperamental, the Victron App doesn’t display right, so on. But Bluetooth works and connects for all apps.

    Definitely will refine and revisit but great to have the backup connection to controllers and batteries.

    Updated and Retried on LineageOS 23 11/18/25

  • 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

  • MacOS and “unreleased” disk space weirdness

    MacOS and “unreleased” disk space weirdness

    Mac Studio with 512 GB of space and yet somehow almost 300 GB was unaccounted for? Often I leave the system running (it sips power at idle and is mostly solar powered) and mostly don’t install apps just run various terminal and text apps, nothing terribly heavy. Well, maybe local AI plays a part? Also apparently Time Machine can sometimes unnecessarily lock up space. There are a few variables to pin down here. Time Machine, Xcode, half dozen Terminal windows, Affinity? There are few different processes that could be causing a disk leak? (As opposed to a memory leak.)

    Anyway, needs some testing but for now if you have a MacOS drive that has a huge disparity in free space, even using a breakdown app like Disk Inventory X, restart or shutdown and startup. It will take a moment after restarting for the drive to clear out but that should do the trick.

    Updated and Retried on MacOS 26.0.1 11/12/25

  • MemTest PSA, Run MemTest before NAS OS Setup

    Pretty much the title. TrueNAS installed, ran, and mostly worked on RAM that threw so many errors in MemTest I’m surprised the system posted at all. TrueNAS, being ZFS based, uses RAM heavily for caching, reading, and writing so data was getting corrupted in weird ways with confusing errors. What made it hard to pin down was that the system ran, created pools, and overall worked unexpectedly well where another OS probably would have failing during install; in a way, the simplicity of TrueNAS hid hardware instability. The errors only showed up when starting to work with data.

    Even if you experience issues with a long running, otherwise issue free system, memtest as a first troubleshooting step. RAM can go bad over time (though that happens less often.)

    Updated 2025/11/11

  • 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

  • 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