Recent AWS outages sent Alex on a hunt to find more self-hosted alternatives, and Chris digs into the latest Home Assistant release.

Plus a frenzy of your excellent feedback and questions.

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Links:

• AWS explains outage — A major Amazon Web Services outage on Tuesday started after network devices got overloaded, the company said on Friday.
• Arthur on Twitter — The AWS outage trickled down to my automated Christmas lights not turning on tonight
• WLED — Control WS2812B and many more types of digital RGB LEDs with an ESP8266 or ESP32 over WiFi!
• John Foreman on Twitter — AWS had an outage and now I can't vacuum the dog hair in my living room. What a time to be alive
• Valetudo — Valetudo is a standalone binary, which runs on rooted Vacuums of the Xiaomi ecosystem and aims to enable the user to operate the robot vacuum without any Cloud Connection whatsoever.
• Amazon Web Services crashed today : amazonecho — I spent about an hour restarting routers, checking for updates, unplugging and plugging in devices, and scouring the web for answers and finally saw in the news that an AWS outage took out a huge chunk of the internet. Amazon hasn’t released a statement yet, that I know of, but I assume this is what’s affecting all of the devices, e.g., my smart plug stopped working and my echo dot and show only stream one song before quitting for no apparent reason.
• Tasmota — Total local control with quick setup and updates. Control using MQTT, Web UI, HTTP or serial. Automate using timers, rules or scripts. Integration with home automation solutions. Incredibly expandable and flexible.
• log4j Vulnerability | Info :: LinuxServer.io — Multiple vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046) have been discovered in log4j which can lead to denial of service and remote code execution. The following Linuxserver containers have been confirmed not to be affected by CVE-2021-44228 or CVE-2021-45046 due to existing mitigations, upstream patches, or workarounds applied to the container images.
• changedetection.io — The best and simplest self-hosted open source website change detection monitoring and notification service. An alternative to Visualping, Watchtower etc. Designed for simplicity - the main goal is to simply monitor which websites had a text change. Open source web page change detection - Now also includes JSON API change detection and monitoring support!
• 2021.12 - Home Assistant — New configuration menu, the button entity, and gorgeous area cards!
• Paulus Schoutsen on Twitter — With @NabuCasa we’re doing all our meetings in VR. It feels more like being together compared to a grid of webcam feeds. Especially for collaborative sessions this is a big win.
• How to Approach a company about building an HA integration on their API? — From the web UI I can see that the system is designed with security in mind - each request must contain various tokens generated with a combination of AES256 encryption, MD5 and SHA512 hashing of the rest of the request, along with device-provided keys and various state-tracking.
• Infrastructure as Code - Perfect Media Server — This simple philosophy of managing configuration in the same way as we do with source code revolutionized the way I approach building systems.
• Get Together | New Server Christening — Lets get together, share some foods, and power up the new Jupiter Broadcasting local server. Then stick around and listen in to a live recording of LINUX Unplugged from the studio.