Yesterday I wrote about a small Python terminal remote for my Apple TV. It solved the immediate problem of typing searches and long passwords without an iPhone, but I still wanted something I could use from my Android phone. By the end of that post, I was considering a small web app running on my home server.

My first thought this morning was to add a --serve argument to the terminal app. Keep the command-line interface, add a few buttons and a text field in a browser, and reuse the pairing code. That seemed manageable, but I already had Home Assistant running with its Apple TV integration paired. Before adding another service to maintain, I wanted to see how much of the problem the community had already solved.

I recently got an Apple TV to replace my older Chromecast setup. As an Android user, I don’t have an iPhone to take advantage of Apple’s more integrated setup process, so I had to set it up manually. That meant typing logins and passwords with the included remote and an on-screen keyboard. Not the greatest user experience, especially when the passwords aren’t exactly short.

My first thought was to grab a remote app from the Play Store, but the options I looked at either had ads, wanted a subscription, or had reviews raising concerns about data collection. For something that sends button presses to a box on my own network, that felt like a lot of baggage.

I booted up Helldivers 2 one night, eager to defend managed democracy with friends. When the game launched on my NixOS desktop, the framerate had tanked: I was getting 20–30 FPS before even launching a mission. I’d updated my machine earlier that day, so I asked my friends to give me a minute while I rebooted into the previous system generation.

Back at the desktop, I launched Helldivers 2 again and it was smooth as butter. After saying goodnight to my friends, I tracked the problem down to a Mesa version bump in the last batch of updates. The update had broken the game, but rolling back meant I didn’t have to fix it before we could play.

I have a couple of cameras around the house to keep an eye on the cats when I’m away. The ones I use are Reolink E1 Zoom cameras. They work entirely offline, no cloud account required, no mandatory app sign-in, just a camera on the local network. The limitation is obvious once you leave the house. If the camera is only reachable on 192.168.0.x, remote access usually means either handing that job to Reolink’s relay service or exposing something on your own network. I wanted neither.

In my previous post I documented the migration from 1Password to Proton Pass and landed on a workaround for the main annoyance: pass-cli stores its local encryption key in the Linux kernel keyring, which is wiped on every reboot, forcing a manual pass-cli login before SSH keys could be loaded each morning.

Fortunately, Proton has now merged a change that makes this unnecessary and allows for a setup much closer to that of 1Password.

With a recent change to pricing for 1Password I’ve finally made the decision to migrate over to Proton Pass. It’s already included in my Proton Duo subscription and Proton Pass has made strides with its features since launch.

Recently I noticed that my volume was at 100% after rebooting my desktop NixOS machine. My audio setup runs through a Schiit Fulla DAC over USB, nothing exotic, just a clean external DAC for headphones. I could turn the volume down during a session and it would stay put, but the next reboot it was back at full blast. It wasn’t anything big but it was annoying enough to actually dig into.

On a Sunday morning I sat down to start playing a Steam game via Proton on my Framework 13 laptop. Upon booting into the game I noticed that the cursor tracked perfectly, moving exactly where I expected it to, but clicks never registered. I could hover over a button in the game, click, and nothing would happen.

I hadn’t used the laptop for gaming in a long while, the Steam Deck had mostly taken over that role, but I had a hankering for a more mouse-driven game and the Framework 13 has plenty of power for these cases.