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Let me be clear, I'm absolutely NOT promoting this brand, company or otherwise, and I am also not receiving payment or gratis products.

I have been fighting Tuya lights for some time (Costco Feit branded color bulbs). I had picked them up at something like $5/each there in a 4 pack and overall have been happy with them. This started to change about a few months ago, it seemed that they would lose their pairing with Tuya's servers in China and would randomly and usually just when I needed them the most, become unavailable. I had placed all 4 of them in the apartment, 3 in the living room and one in the bedroom. The one where I felt it the most - the bedroom. 5 minutes before I retire for the evening, it's set to turn on the light, and then after 30 minutes, if I haven't already, turns it off. I also have the living room lights programmed to turn on during certain times of the day and off using the Simple Scheduler plugin (I highly recommend it!)

Fast forward to last week, I was sick and tired of the random connectivity issues so I went on the hunt and settled with a pack 6 Matter color bulbs and jumped at the chance. So, I bought them, and they arrived today. I can honestly tell you, that there was absolutely NO problem paring them to Home Assistant and the color control is amazingly accurate! The comfort of knowing that I shouldn't have to worry about losing my light connectivity is priceless now. :) If anyone is curious, this is the brand and so far I can say they are simply amazing!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLTWFJWY?psc=1

About Tuya and Tuya Local

I'm not totally abandoning Tuya itself, but the goal is to eventually be independent from their devices. Right now, I have a dehumidifier and all of my old lights and a massively long 400 light string light all connected via Tuya. The bulbs, will probably be stored as a "backup" or filed away for use in non-essential areas where connectivity is not as important.

Tuya Local is an amazing and awesome option, which completely lets you control your devices locally and I use that on the dehumidifer. I also had the old bulbs on there as well. The string lights, I tried, but it's a major process of learning what 'DP' Codes correspond to what color you want. I just left those paired to the cloud as Tuya provided the necessary mapping.

You may ask why then, if I had them on Tuya Local, why didn't I just use that to control my lights? The answer lies within the process of obtaining the local key from Tuya. If anyone who has done this knows, Tuya loves to change up their site's navigation and settings and it's seemingly random when they do. I finally got smart though and mapped out the device ID and the super secret and important "Local Key" and recorded those in Joplin. I lived with them like this for a couple of years, but I started to encounter random "crashing" of the lights if you will, where they would go offline and in spite of switching to Tuya Cloud (I have the app on my phone), they would refuse to become available, so I had to factory reset the bulbs to the ever familiar blinking lights process. What I didn't realize at the time, but I later did, when you reset the lights, the local key also resets to a new one. There was a time too, where more recently and was my final decision when within a 72 hour period, I had to reset a light three times.

Matter

It's encouraging to finally be able to use the Matter integration in Home Assistant, it's justifiably flagged as (Beta). Simply put, there is a slight delay from when you trigger the light before it turns on or reacts. This really isn't a big deal for us though. Additionally, I was able to add these to Google Home effortlessly which also makes them Wife Approved. :) The lights do not have a delay there, also, the app they want you to use experiences no delay.

Overall, for my first experience with the Matter devices, I was simply amazed at how easy it was to connect. I discovered that Home Assistant asks you to use the phone app to scan the QR code on the box (The bulb in this case) to obtain the pairing code and it seamlessly integrated it. My phone is a Pixel 8a which has Android 15 on it and before I even got to Home Assistant, it was asking me to scan the QR Code for matter setup.

**Light Quality and impressions

I will say these are pretty bright and not blindly so, but they are plenty bright. :) They have great color to them and the color temperature is awesomely simple. Ours are set to a nice 4000k.

Construction of the bulbs feel to be of decent quality. At least with Amazon, where I bought these, finding locally controlled bulbs was not too easy, and this brand (OREIN) was the only seller which sold Matter devices. If you are looking for a supported Matter light bulb, this may be what you need. :)

Someone here brought up that they were able to replace Cloudflare Tunnels with Tailscale - I can't seem to find the post, as it was a comment and deeply buried in a thread I've since forgotten the title of. :)

Can anyone explain the process for doing this? I assume it's through the use of their Funnel? I have three primary services I require to be accessible through Authentik (that's one of them) via my domain name.

EDIT

To answer the question of why I want to leave Cloudflare Tunnels - is basically that I have several services behind it (I forgot one so make that 4 I wish to have exposed). Two password managers, Psono for my special needs daughter which finds it easier than Bitwarden and Vaultwarden for myself and my work logins. So, I can't just set up a VPN or Tailscale at work to connect my work passwords to. :) I also have Authentik and Home Assistant tunneled at present. That doesn't explain the reason why though so let me start here:

My step-daughter is learning video production and editing, we don't want to share her videos on Youtube or other sites, but would like to keep it more local to home. With that said, Cloudflare may not notice it at first, bit it's against their TOS to stream videos, not to mention their just over 100mb cap for file xfers which leads me to the next reason. Early in May of this year, we were in an auto accident, and we are frequently sending forms, accident photos and paperwork etc to the Attorneys, I want to have control of the ownership of the files and would prefer not to email them, but link them to my server, frequently, those files even zipped can be over 100mb.

I do have a private DDNS provider I have my domain CNAME pointed to so it resolves to the home IP that way, so the ultimate plan is to untie my site from Cloudflare's DNS to a offload to a VPS or two for (NS1 and NS2) With a recent issue with Oracle Cloud, I'm not motivated to use them for this basic purpose.

And just a small part of me is starting to get tin hat against the idea that Cloudflare can decrypt the data before it hits my site before it encrypts it. Just just isn't sitting well with me at the moment. I can't verify this data yet, but I like to play it safe than sorry.

EDIT 2

So, I ran a funnel test and yes it works, but still have to use the ts.net like others said, so at best, I can figure this to be a good backup service. I can't forward a CNAME to my TS DNS. I checked /r/tailscale (Duckduckgo sent me there), and about a month ago, someone asked if you could use your own domain, the answer was "not yet" but there seems to be some interest.

What I found pretty fascinating is the mobile app does work quite well on Android and is so far so good, I can at least feel better knowing that the phones are on WG full time now through Tailscale. I had issues with the official WG client and another one staying on with our phones full time, so this so far has been a good improvement.

As I've gotten older, I find myself doing the old ughs and groan while getting off the couch or say things to my kids that my parents told me. I also truly appreciate the coveted chair or spot on the couch which is "Dad's Spot!"

Let me preface this with this was a dormant account with no instances set up, and I put it into place maybe 4 or 5 years ago while getting into the Self Hosted space. I don't recall if I had MFA setup, but don't think I did as it was a test space. In fact, I forgot I even had it up until now.

So this weekend, we were out of town and I get this alert from Oracle Cloud saying that my account was locked with a password reset link/ This was set to an email I've had since 2004 and has been sold many many times on the dark web as evidenced by the amount of SPAM I get on it and as my monitoring services confirm. I figured it was a weak ploy at a fishing to get my credentials so I ignored it. Then about 3 or 4 or so minutes later, the account was unlocked with another email to confirm this. (Without my touching anything)

So, last night when I returned home, I went to Oracle ignoring the email links and used my browse's address bar. To no surprise of my own, I can't log in or reset my credentials. Somehow, the attackers were able to exploit their platform to intercept the password reset and change everything to their credentials.

It's no real loss on my end honestly, Oracle had an old canceled debit card number for re-occurring billing if I should have ever used their services anyway. It just bugs me that they allowed it to happen so easily. Having the lack of MFA, I'm sure didn't help the matter, but honestly, what gets me the most - their password reset email and the one saying it was unlocked with no links or contact information to correct the situation if this was incorrect. Further proof on my end that oracle doesn't care about anything other than the money grab.

tl:dr My lack of MFA enabled hackers to attack my formerly dormant and forgotten Oracle account, and locked me out and Oracle doesn't seem to mind.

My weekly airing of Alf was coming on and I was 14 years old at the time. My dad, an ex firefighter and dispatcher had his trusty scanner relaxing in his favorite easy chair and the call came down at 8pm - a massive fire was happening downtown. We all scrambled out of the house excitedly to go "chase" the fire. It was his favorite past time to relive the old days of firefighting and boy this was the fire of all fires for him!

So, we drove downtown to where it was, about 2 blocks away, you could see the flames shooting out of the 5 story brick building and the closer you got to it, the hotter the heat was. We found a place to park and watched the firefighters do their best. By now, the fire was melting the lamp poles across the street and everyone had to move away from the intense heat. Firefighters turned to surrounding buildings and sprayed water on the old post office, library and other historic buildings to keep them cool and wet against the embers. Sometime later during that time, the entire side of the building collapsed in the street blanketing anything below in red hot bricks. Later on that night, the news showed footage and didn't bleep out the "Oh Shit!" comment from the camera man filming it.

More about the fire here: (Sorry, it's a very small entry for them) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medford_Hotel

Unfortunately, the archive that would have the most information no longer exists, the local news paper closed down earlier this year and took the site with it.

The story goes, they tracked down the source of the fire to a torch accidentally setting the building ablaze. For the years prior to this, it was an old historic Hotel and was being renovated to be converted for low income housing. During this process, they think someone set a hot torch down and wasn't thinking about the safety at the time and that's all it took to light up the old wood and materials inside.

For a while longer after that, the shell of the building stayed in place while they rebuilt the building with brick and matched it to the original look.