
The latest project
Holiday Theming for Home Assistant Dashboards
Give Home Assistant dashboards seasonal accents using the holiday state you already have. Keep cameras, reminders, and controls in place while Codex helps…
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Hands-on guides, working code, and the lessons learned along the way. From enterprise IT to the smart home.
Carlo Costanzo · 25+ years in technology
Longtime VMware vExpert honoree

The latest project
Give Home Assistant dashboards seasonal accents using the holiday state you already have. Keep cameras, reminders, and controls in place while Codex helps…
Read the guideThe blog
Give Home Assistant dashboards seasonal accents using the holiday state you already have. Keep cameras, reminders, and controls in place while Codex helps connect the idea to your…
See how a custom Roku app and Home Assistant turn idle TV time into a household dashboard, with the regular remote ready when it's time to watch.
Set a gentler brightness for any dimmable light that turns on at night, without maintaining a light list. A complete Home Assistant package and a short YAML walkthrough.
Our living room Samsung TV becomes a Home Assistant kiosk when the Roku screensaver starts. Here is how Haven, passive camera views, and shared household notifications fit together.
My retired Gen 2 Nest now cycles through family photos, shows Home Assistant alerts for two minutes, and follows our bedtime, away and guest states.
Use separate local Frigate classifiers to see which garbage and recycling bins still need moving, then narrow and stop the existing Home Assistant reminders.
Replace Wolfram Alpha holiday lookups with local Python calculations while keeping Home Assistant countdown sensors, personalized speech, and seasonal lighting.
Replace cloud LLM Vision package checks with local Frigate state classification. Keep your Home Assistant helpers and alerts, and let Codex help train the model on your own…
Bring Cloudflare certificate, tunnel, and origin alerts into Home Assistant with authenticated webhooks, persistent Repairs, and verified recovery.

The person behind the projects
I’m a senior virtualization consultant, longtime VMware vExpert honoree, and the person behind vCloudInfo and the Bear Stone Smart Home. I share what I learn so you can build on it.
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