u/GoingOffRoading

Hey r/crboxes. Long time lurker, first time user.

I'm in the PNW and we're getting hammered with 130 ug/m3 PM2.5 right now.

I have a MERV 13 air filter in the furnace, but wanted to be extra cautious and bought a cheap Sonoff air quality sensor, 20" fan, and a 20x20x4 MERV 12 filter (meant to buy 13... Oops).

Before I assembled the CRBox, we were at like 25 ug/m3 PM2.5 on the Sonoff sensor inside of the house.

After assembling and running the fan on low in a 8,000 cubic foot space, the PM2.5 is down to 8.

I expect that the cheap Sonoff sensor isn't that accurate... But... That's def an improvement.

One question:

Are CRBoxes really this effective?

It's been about a year since I played with OpenWebUI, and I started to experiment with it again.. Some notes:

• OpenWebUI, ComfyUI, Ollama running in containers on Kubernetes
• I have a ComfyUI workflow that works
• Ollama via OpenWebUI works
• I have followed all of the steps from the ComfyUI integration documentation
• OpenWebUI is able to connect to ComfyUI
• I'm 99% certain the nodeIDs are mapped correctly
• Even if I toggle Image on Integrations when starting a chat, the button to generate an image does not appear
• Using /image or asking to generate an image prompts Gemma to state that it can not generate images
• I can confirm from the networking tab, that my configuration being returned in the UI has image enabled

Any ideas on how to get image generation working in OpenWebUI?

Some setup details:

• Ghost is deployed in a container on Kubernetes
• I have Ghost configured for MailGun:
  • API for bulk sends
  • SMTP for transactional emails
• MailGun's settings have been added to my DNS for authenticity

When I create a post in Ghost, which triggers sending an email to all subscribers, everything on the Ghost side appear to work correctly:

[2026-07-28 16:13:44] INFO Sending email to 2 recipients
[2026-07-28 16:13:44] INFO Sent message (337ms)
[2026-07-28 16:13:44] INFO [BULK_EMAIL_DB_RETRY] Sending email batch 6a68d53755be3600014b9893  - Finished (after 1st try)
[2026-07-28 16:13:44] INFO [BULK_EMAIL_DB_RETRY] save batch 6a68d53755be3600014b9893 -> submitted - Started (1st try)
[2026-07-28 16:13:44] INFO [BULK_EMAIL_DB_RETRY] save batch 6a68d53755be3600014b9893 -> submitted - Finished (after 1st try)
[2026-07-28 16:13:44] INFO [BULK_EMAIL_DB_RETRY] save EmailRecipients 6a68d53755be3600014b9893 processed_at - Started (1st try)
[2026-07-28 16:13:44] INFO [BULK_EMAIL_DB_RETRY] save EmailRecipients 6a68d53755be3600014b9893 processed_at - Finished (after 1st try)
[2026-07-28 16:13:44] INFO Email 6a68d53755be3600014b9892 send done: 1/1 batches succeeded, 0 unstarted
[2026-07-28 16:13:44] INFO [BULK_EMAIL_DB_RETRY] email 6a68d53755be3600014b9892 -> submitted - Started (1st try)
[2026-07-28 16:13:44] INFO [BULK_EMAIL_DB_RETRY] email 6a68d53755be3600014b9892 -> submitted - Finished (after 1st try)

And everything in the MailGun logs appears as expected:

07/28/26 12:13:44 PM	Delivered	The Daily Awesome	Email Address Remobed	2.0.0 OK 1785255224 af79cdse357-932de68df35bsi1020377985a.253 - gsmtp

But no email is recieved.

Any ideas?

I am... Scratching my head on this one.

Randomly, one day 2-3 weeks ago:

• All of my SmartWings shades went dead
• A smattering of light switches from different vendors went dead

Some notes:

• Ignore the thermostat... It was old and physically died
• I have not had lighting strikes or power surges that I know of
• I am solar + battery + grid connected
• The SmartWings shades still work as expected with the remote, but won't re-join the zwave network, even if I hard-reset the shade and try to pair. Also, these are all battery powered.
• No matter what I do, I am unable to remove these dead notes from ZWaveJS
• 100% of my other battery powered ZWave devices work just fine
• The Innovellis in this screenshot died are 100% of my Innovellis
• HomeAssistant & ZWaveJS are on a compute node that is behind a Sin Wave UPS, and should be getting VERY clean power. No events/notifications from the UPS.

Any ideas on:

• How this may have happened?
• How to remove these dead nodes? Every process I have found from Google does not seem to work.

EDIT 1:

• Now able to remove dead nodes: Update

EDIT 2:

As u/ElectroSpore pointed out, I wonder if I had a malfunctioning node acting as a relay. Half of my Smartwings Shades came back. One did not because I did a factory reset. The other is in close proximity to switches that are now reporting as dead. Still investigating.

Like a lot of you perverts enthusiasts, I run a lot of the r/homelab staples for my household:

• NextCloud for pictures/files
• Files stored on a TrueNas machine + cloud, following the 3-2-1 backup strategy

But if something were to happen to me or the house while I am out, we needed a non-technical wife-friendly GTFO option for our family data (important documents, family photos, etc).

What I came up with was:

• A Samsung T7 2Tb Portable USB-C External SSD
• Plugged into my Ubuntu compute node, mounted via fstab
• Target directories created on the USB SSD (one folder for each family member)
• rsync container on a daily cron to check for the SSD/directory, then rsync

This means that if something happens to me or the house, my wife can snatch the USB drive and all of our documents and photos are plug and play on any computer.

Questions:

• For anybody that has dabbled in external USB SSDs, is something like the Samsung T7 sufficiently reliable/durable? .
• Has anybody thought of any other options for easy wife-friendly file backups?

I am starting on a built in for my closet... Think like THIS.

For the uninitiated, there's a kind of LED strip where each individual LED is controllable.. Like THIS. Not only can each LED be switched on/off/dimmed, the color can be controlled too.

Moving beyond the perspective of smarthome, software, integration perspective, does it make sense to install individually addressable LED strips when doing LED strip lighting:

• Get near infinite adjustability on brightness, kelvin temperature if trying to get multiple lighting sources to match (i.e. all soft white, and all the same hue, or if other lighting sources change)
• Can get a little goofy for holidays
• Integrate into other actions, like turning on light switches elsewhere

Or is this stupid and simple soft white LED strips are more than sufficient?

Ignore the mess.

If you were building the next version of your workbenches, would you use 2x4s for vertical runs, or 4x4s?

Let's pretend plywood isn't an option here.

Obviously nothing on the workbench is going to exceed what a 2x4 can support, but I also see a ton of builds using full 4x4 posts.

From the rules:

• Location: Seattle, WA
• Planted: ~7-8 years ago
• Sun: Yard is South facing, but partially blocked by neighbor behind me
• Water: 36-48" of rain. In the summer, the lawn/trees get 10 minutes from an oscillating sprinkler at dawn every morning.
• Transferred: Burlet Bag but the bag was removed prior to planting
• Planting Procedure: 3-4' deep hole, with 6-12" of extra diameter. 1cu/ft of chicken manure dumped beneath the tree. Remaining role around the root ball was filled with a mix of compost, top-soil, and incumbent soil
• No landscape fabric

Late in the spring, we had HEAVY snow. We called it Cascadian Concrete; it's wet, sticks to everything (like trees) and weighs a ton.

The snow took out a substantial branch one of my trees in the front yard. Now that spring is here and the trees are filling in again, I am seeing a disturbing trend across multiple species of deciduous trees (the evergreens are unaffected) in multiple yards: excessive sagging.

In both pictures, you can see how the upper branches still form a sort of \|/ pattern. This is how the trees grew and filled out every year. Except this year, the lower branches look more _|_, as you can see in both pictures.

I have already trimmed some of the extra/overlapping off-shoots off of the sagging branches, but they still aren't recovering to the expected pattern of \|/.

Should this be something to be worried about?

Not my images, but a few I have collected for inspiration.

One of my next projects is to replace our rusty metal outdoor chairs with a nice bench like this. Existing 24"x24" pads would carry right over.

The project is super strait forward:

• Get a gaggle of pine 2x4s (too cheap for Cedar)
• Cut to length
• Run through jointer or planer to make the faces pretty
• Countersink screws
• Assemble
• Sand
• Oil based stain/sealer

Easy peasy.

But I am hung up on one detail....

I live in the Pacific North West and it's wet here... A LOT... Which means moisture will be collecting on the pads for the entirety of the duration that the pads are out.

I could angle the seats 5-10* to help with drainage but am hesitant on how effective this would actually be.

Does angling the benches to allow for better drainage of the seats/pads make a meaningful difference in usability?