I pulled two DJI Spark batteries out of a drawer after months (ahem…years) of storage, plugged one into the drone, and got the same useless answer both times: LEDs 1 and 2 flashing in sequence, then dark. No charge. No life. From what I could find, DJI’s official fix is a $60-70 replacement they barely…
Category: Guides & Hacks
CategoriesGuides & Hacks
Why Is My Home Assistant MariaDB So Big? Tracking Down 145 Million Rows of Bloat
If you read my last post about Home Assistant backups going missing a few weeks ago, you’ll remember I had a secondary problem lurking in the background. My MariaDB addon was eating 57GB of disk space, and it was the main reason my backups kept failing. Time to figure out what the hell is going…
CategoriesGuides & Hacks
Home Assistant Backups Missing But Storage Full? Here’s What I Found
So I’m getting a “Data disk is running low on free space” warning from Home Assistant. Cool. 83GB of 83GB used. The whole drive is full! I check Settings, System, Storage and it breaks down where everything is going. 57GB in addons_data (that’s my MariaDB database, which is a whole other problem for another day),…
CategoriesGuides & Hacks
Why Is My Home Assistant Energy Dashboard So Wrong? How to Fix Statistics Database Corruption
So there I was, casually checking my Home Assistant Energy Dashboard, y’know like the average person does every Sunday morning, when I noticed something… off. According to my dashboard, I’d consumed 2,425,370.32 kWh of electricity in 2025. For context, that’s roughly the annual consumption of a small industrial facility. My electricity bill? A cool CA$242,533.56.…
CategoriesGuides & Hacks
Fix EasyApache 4 PHP Install Failures Caused by Imunify360 Hardened PHP
When EasyApache Won’t Install PHP and You Don’t Know Why You’re in WHM, trying to install PHP 7.4 (yes, I know – outdated!) through EasyApache 4, and it spits this back at you: If you’re staring at this wondering what the hell libargon2 has to do with anything, you’re not alone. I hit this exact…
CategoriesGuides & Hacks
Perfect Proxmox Tweaks for Homelab SSD and NVMe Installs
Running Proxmox off an SSD or NVMe makes your UI snappy and boots lightning-fast. But if you’re on a consumer-grade drive, there’s a catch: these drives weren’t built for constant write-heavy workloads. Proxmox does a lot of logging, RRD data collection, and swap usage that can wear a cheap NVMe faster than you expect. So,…
CategoriesGuides & Hacks
Upgrade Proxmox VE 8 to 9 on Standalone Nodes: Real-World Runbook with Fixes
How to Upgrade Proxmox VE 8 to 9 Without Breaking Your Nodes Proxmox VE 9.0 dropped on August 5, 2025, and if you’re running a homelab or small production node, you’re probably wondering: “Should I upgrade now, and how much pain will it be?” The good news: it’s not rocket science. The bad news: there…
CategoriesGuides & Hacks
How to Remove the Proxmox VE Subscription Message (8.3+)
Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) is an incredibly powerful open-source platform for virtualization, offering robust features without requiring a paid subscription. However, unless you purchase a Proxmox support license, you’ll be greeted by a pop-up message every time you log into the web UI: “You do not have a valid subscription for this server.” While Proxmox…
CategoriesGuides & Hacks
Installing and Configuring iVentoy: Network Booting Made Easy
Anyone who deals with IT deployments, system administration, or just enjoys the chaos of spinning up virtual machines on a whim has probably used Ventoy at some point. If you haven’t, it’s a fantastic tool that allows you to create a bootable USB drive loaded with multiple ISOs without constantly reformatting. Just drop your ISOs…
CategoriesGuides & Hacks
Setting Up SMB Storage in Proxmox (And Fixing the ISO Visibility Issue)
Setting up network storage in Proxmox seems straightforward. Add an SMB share, point it to your NAS, and boom – instant access to your ISOs, right? That was the plan at least. My first instinct was to do it the way I know how… the “Linux way”, mounting everything via the command line. But after…