The Smart Home Gazette

A newspaper about one man's descent into home automation.
Vol. VII · Special Edition · Filed from Munich at 03:47 AM.

What's inside · Read it locally · The evidence · Corrections

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The story

A man bought a smart light bulb. Several years later, his name is in a Rust changelog.

This repository is the newspaper of record for that particular failure of judgment. Every detail actually happened. The IKEA bulbs happened. The Aqara FP2 happened. The 847-line automation.yaml happened. The golden epoxy-resin hand sculpture holding a Zigbee coordinator next to the coffee machine: that also happened, and there are witnesses.

It is written as a Late Edition broadsheet because that is how it felt while it was happening.

What's inside

Five acts, one investigative reconstruction, a sidebar of diminishing sanity:

• Act I — The Status Quo. Six apps. Eight ecosystems. Technically fine.
• Act II — The Catalyst. One millimetre-wave presence sensor. €90 collapsed into a binary signal.
• Act III — The Consolidation. Home Assistant was supposed to end the tinkering. It did not end the tinkering.
• Act IV — The Relocation. 54 Zigbee devices, a congested 2.4 GHz band, and a decorative object with a radio antenna.
• Act V — The Aftermath. Pull requests in three languages the subject does not write. Merged anyway.

Also: a Sanity Index, a Glossary of Escalation, Reader Mail, and a Classifieds section where a €90 presence sensor is sold with a statistical warning about Home Assistant.

Read it online

The paper lives on GitHub Pages, because a newspaper should be publicly accessible and because static HTML remains the only web technology that reliably works.

• English edition — florianhorner.github.io/smart-home-gazette
• Deutsche Ausgabe — florianhorner.github.io/smart-home-gazette/de.html

Read it locally

It is a handful of HTML files with inline CSS. Open any of them in a browser. That is it.

git clone https://github.com/florianhorner/smart-home-gazette.git
cd smart-home-gazette
open index.html     # macOS
# or: xdg-open index.html (Linux) / start index.html (Windows)

If you prefer to serve it properly — sticky header, theme toggle, the whole experience:

python3 -m http.server 8000
# then visit http://localhost:8000/

No build step. No npm install. No framework. This is on purpose.

The evidence

Every open-source contribution referenced in Act V is real and linked:

Project	Language	What	Status
govee2mqtt	Rust	Unicode crash fix for Chinese preset names	Merged
addon-glances	Bash, Docker	Deprecation fixes, 502 bug fix	PR #603, PR #604
addon-glances fork	Bash, Docker	MQTT export, security hardening, Glances upgrade	Published
Lightener	TypeScript	Visual brightness curve editor card	In progress

The pattern is not "I learned to code." The pattern is: the barrier to contributing to open source is gone.

Files in this repository

• index.html — the English edition, five acts, full sidebar, Classifieds
• de.html — die deutsche Ausgabe
• cost-of-light-switch.html — itemised receipts for the light switch
• escalation-timeline.html — the timeline, plotted
• docs/banner.html — the masthead banner source (renders to docs/banner.png)

Corrections and letters

The Gazette accepts corrections via GitHub issues and PRs via the usual mechanism. Editorial preferences:

• Factual corrections welcome. Dates, product names, technical claims.
• Tonal corrections less welcome. The deadpan is load-bearing.
• Typos: yes please.
• "Have you considered Matter?" — see Glossary of Escalation, entry MATTER.

About the author

Written by Florian Horner — an AWS account executive, not an engineer. Built with Claude Code as part of the Cross-Ecosystem Claude Sledgehammer Tour: a series documenting what happens when a non-engineer uses AI to contribute to real open-source projects.

His parents still don't understand. The maintainers do.

License

Content: CC BY 4.0 — share it, quote it, translate it, print it on a broadsheet. Attribution appreciated.