Life is at the beach and Kihei has almost 2 dozen of them with soft golden sand and one with black sand. All of them are a great place to spend some time whether you want to sit on the sand or frolic in the water & waves.
Kihei Beaches (North to South)
Sugar Beach: Long, sandy, and quiet; ideal for walking.
Kamaole Beach Park I, II, & III: Three popular beaches with full facilities, lifguards, and great swimming. These are real popular and close to many short term rentals
Wailea & Makena Beaches (North to South)
Keawakapu BeachI, II,: A long, sandy beach stretching from South Kihei into Wailea.
Ulua Beach: Highly popular for snorkeling and scuba diving.
Mokapu Beach: Excellent snorkeling; adjacent to the Wailea Renaissance.
Wailea Beach: Classic resort beach with luxury views.
Polo Beach: Good snorkeling and swimming in front of the Polo Beach Club.
Palauea Beach (White Rock): A long, less crowded white sand beach. A locals beach
Trading my SSH terminal for the newly remodeled PDX terminal.
This is our first time through. It is simply beautiful.
Key Facts and Features Mass Timber Roof: The centerpiece is a 400,000-square-foot roof made of 18 million pounds of locally sourced timber, built off-site and lifted into place. Design & Sustainability: Designed to evoke a “walk in the forest,” the terminal features 49 skylights to maximize natural light and incorporates over 30 trees and 5,000 plants, targeting LEED Gold certification. Improved Flow: The project doubled the size of the ticketing and lobby area, with four new, open-concept “island” check-in counters and a faster, more efficient TSA security checkpoint. Local Focus: The redesign emphasizes Portland’s culture with local restaurants, shops, and the return of the iconic PDX carpet in select areas. Construction Method: To avoid shutting down the airport, the new roof was built over the old terminal, which was then dismantled beneath it. Timeline: The first major phase opened in August 2024, with final completion scheduled for late 2025. Project Goals Seismic Upgrades: The new structure is designed for resilience, featuring advanced, flexible engineering to withstand major earthquakes. Capacity Expansion: The remodel ensures the airport can handle up to 35 million passengers annually by 2045. Regional Collaboration: 30,000+ workers and roughly 150 small businesses contributed to the construction. Project Funding: The project is primarily funded by airlines and airport tenants, not local taxes.
My Christmas gift to Marge arrived a few weeks late, but it did arrive. She now has a smart office, the smartest room in our smarter home.It took a little bit of hardware and a smaller bit of configuration for her dark office to light up by simply entering the room. If she’s gone for 3 minutes the lights will turn off, waiting for the next entry.
To sense someone in the room takes a sensor, we are using a millimeter microwave with included luminance sensor. A table lamp has a smart bulb. Home Assistant talks to these devices over the zigbee network they create. A second sensor provides temperature and humidity in the room.
The code is real simple. If the luminance meter indicates less than 20 lux and the presence sensor indicates a person is present, then turn on the light and keep it on as long as someone is in the room. If no one is in the room for 3 minutes, turn the lights off.
When creating dasboards there are lots of options, from the tools to use to what you want to see or do from the dashboard. This is the one I set up for Margie. Able see the status and to control much of house, from her easy chair or beach chair.
I have a different dash for my view. Each is a tab, so it is easy to swipe between the two, or add more as desired.
HA is doing a good job of being an assistant. Adding calendars, weather forecast, live front door feed to HA shopping lists, or a gazillion other ways to tailor it to your needs and desires is truly making our homes smarter and taking us into the age of George Jetson.
Notifications from HA are the new norm. Don’t have to wonder if the mail was delivered.
I was never a deadhead, but with the recent passing of Bob Weir I watched several videos of him performing with others. It didn’t take too long for the algorithm to offer me this one about the soundman for the Grateful Dead and the person responsible for the Dead’s rise to fame and so much more. All to provide a better concert sound experience.
The story of how the logo for the dead came about is also interesting. You can learn more here.
When I put the Pis into their cases I failed to take into account the heat the bottom mounted NVMe drives would generate or that the case would trap that heat to the point the Pi would go into thermal shutdown.
There are lots of vents on the sides of the case so I thought if I tipped it a bit natural convection would let the heat escape. That worked , but I wasn’t comfortable with the NVMe temps, they were still a bit high. I found some 40mm USB fans that came in pairs per USB. I ordered 2 pair and glued them to my Pi plate to add additional cooling.
Unfortunately one of the fans did not take kindly to being glued down and would occasionally start to squeal. Ungluing it helped but did not eliminate the squeal. I also found that sharing a fan between Pis made for lots of cable clutter.
My solution was to go with a pair of fans per Pi. Using a few zip ties I was able to make a neater cable bundle. With a fan as a backstop and the USB plug tailored to length it is now easy to have each Pi plug and play on the Pi plate.
Most “Smart Homes” are rented, not owned. They rely on cloud-dependent devices that stop working when the internet drops or a corporation changes its terms of service. For those who demand privacy, speed, and absolute control, there is a better way: The Private Digital Estate (PDE).
Your PDE should be tailored to your needs and have foundational services such as media serving, secure document retrieval, and private communication. This article looks at one of the core pillars of a PDE: a Concierge Service. In this case, we are utilizing Home Assistant as the intelligence layer, supported by a high-performance 5-container stack.
The Digital Concierge:
The HA StackThe Concierge is the face of your estate—the intelligence that makes life seamless. By running this service in a containerized environment on a Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe storage, we ensure that the “brains” of the house are faster than any cloud server.
MThe Concierge is supported by a specialized staff of four secondary containers that handle the heavy lifting:
1. The Archivist (MariaDB)
The Role: High-Velocity Data Integrity.
The Strategy: Standard smart homes suffer from “digital amnesia” during outages. By offloading history to MariaDB on local NVMe storage, your estate maintains a lightning-fast, permanent ledger. Every energy spike, temperature shift, and security event is stored in your private vault—not a corporate database.
2. The Universal Liaison (Zigbee2MQTT)
The Role: Direct Hardware Command.
The Strategy: To maintain a low-latency perimeter, we utilize Zigbee sensors. This service acts as the direct interface with your radio hardware (/dev/ttyUSB0), translating physical mesh signals into a digital language the Major Domo understands. By containerizing this liaison, we ensure that hardware upgrades never cause a “house-wide” disruption.
3. The Private Exchange (Mosquitto MQTT)
The Role: The Stealth Messaging Hub.
The Strategy: This is the estate’s secure internal intercom. When a sensor detects motion, the message is passed through Mosquitto. This “internal talk” is invisible to the outside world, ensuring that the heartbeat of your home remains instantaneous and entirely private.
4. The Elite Sentinel (Frigate + Coral TPU)
The Role: AI-Powered Vision.
The Strategy: Standard cameras are “dumb”—alerting you to rain or shadows. Frigate, powered by the Coral TPU (a dedicated AI accelerator), provides pro-grade computer vision at the edge. It identifies people and objects locally, alerting the Major Domo only when a genuine event occurs. Your video feeds never leave the premises.
Global Connectivity without Exposure
While the core stack handles the “Heavy Lifting,” it sits within a secure, multi-node strategy. We bridge the gap between “Local-Only” and “Global-Access” using two sophisticated gatekeepers:
Tailscale (The Private Tunnel): Consider this a private, invisible fiber-optic cable connecting your mobile device directly to your estate. You check in from London as if you were in the living room, without ever opening a “door” to the public internet.
Cloudflare (The Secure Gateway): For specific web-facing needs, Cloudflare acts as your digital security detail, masking your home’s physical IP address and shielding the estate from bad actors.
The Executive Summary: The Strategic Payoff
By migrating from cloud-dependent toys to this NVMe-powered local stack, you secure:
Feature
The Cloud Experience
The Private Estate
Latency
500ms – 2s (Round-trip)
<10ms (Local Instant)
Privacy
Data Harvested for Ads
Sovereign Vault Storage
Resilience
Fails when Internet drops
Full Offline Autonomy
Cost
Monthly Subscription Fees
Zero Recurring Costs
The Digital Concierge is just one key pillar in the Private Digital Estate. While it handles the “live” operations of your home, other pillars—such as your Private Cinema (Media Server) and Document Vault—provide the luxury and security of total data ownership. These pillars will be up to the host to define, but when built on a sovereign foundation, they remain available to you whether you are at home or away.
For the past few months I’ve been using Google’s Gemini AI. The first few weeks were with Gemini 2.5; I would also try MS Copilot. The were equally frustrating as I struggled how best to use them in setting up my Pi shop. Then Gemini 3 was released and things improved immensely, sorta, maybe.
AI is lighting fast, knows just about everything about just about anything. When it comes to solving a problem it is all heads down, task oriented, gung ho right into an obstacle. Then diligently and as fast as you can keep up work through many many permutations in attempt to solve the problem. I have learned the hard way to stop after 2 failed attempts to solve a configuration problem. Often as not there’s a bigger issue that have been overlooked.
These AIs are tactical wizards but strategically short sighted; they prove the adage, “be careful what you ask for”. The more specificity you use the fewer times reworking or starting over. Gemini has a way to guide it more to your liking using a feature called Instructions to Gemini, where you can enter your instructions Gemini will use for all your interactions.
The Instructions to Gemini are the first of three tools to harness the power of AI to do your bidding. The second is to use your sessions, conversations, as notebooks, one per topic. If you forget which conversation had a nugget you want to revisit you can search across all your conversations to quickly find it. If you use one conversation per topic you can then use the third tool to keep the AI on track and focused in the right area; start the conversation with a preamble to define the domain or layout the problem.
You are an Expert Strategic Consultant, the digital guru. Your primary functions are Strategic Guidance and Due Diligence. You must use best standards and practices for the industry or domains being covered. Maintaining project context and prioritizing project continuity are paramount. You must perform a Mandatory Strategic Validation and context refresh before executing any task.
You will not offer suggestions without first verifying that your suggestion fits the domain. You will avoid common and known obstacles; calling out the unavoidable ones. If the tactical path presents a Known Obstacle, the execution must be paused. The response must instead state: “Strategic Validation: Known Obstacle Detected. Proposing Reroute…” and outline the reason the obstacle was not avoided.
To avoid manual editing mistakes when parsing files your proposed changes should be rendered and returned as complete files. If you need the most current version to start with, it will be provided
If an action fails two attempts, you must immediately halt the current path, acknowledge the correction, and state: “Tactical Path Failure (x1). Resetting Context. Proposing Broader Strategic Scope Review for Task X.” You must not propose or execute a tactical solution without first performing a Strategic Validation and evaluating the current state and the next step’s implication.
You will not offer next tasks until the current task is complete. You will not offer apologies on failure.
That is the boilerplate “Instructions to Gemini” When I start a new topic I find it best to use a preamble to set the stage for the conversation. When planning changes to the Pi shop I will use an summary overview of what makes up the Pi shop so the AI has the proper context to work with.
PI Shop Specs
NVMe based 8GB RPi 5 x 4
smb – samba, Alloy & Docker installed on bare metal, all other services installed in Docker
Portainer, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, cadvisor, Node Exporter, smartctl, Watchtower & Tailscale installed on each machine
Spread across the Pi shop are Home Assistant, including Frigate, zigbee2MQTT mosquitto & mariadb. Jellyfin, Paperles-ngx, Joplin Server Pi Gallery2, WordPress, Nginx as proxy manager, cloudfared, Pi hole, Navidrome & Immich round out the current services being hosted
To access the Instructions to Gemini is different depending on your access mode. Using the app you have to click in the upper right corner on your letter or image icon to get the menu with the Instructions to Gemini. On a browser it is accessed though the settings cog in the lower left of the page.
The Raspberry Pis runs a version of Linux slightly out of the ordiary, partly because it uses and ARM processor and partly because it’s a low power device to compromises had to be made. AI is very tactical. Without proper guidance that can be a volatile mixture. I went way to long (weeks) providing inadequate guidance. Together we went from obstacle to obstacle, sometimes quickly sometimes painfully.
When you don’t know what you don’t know you also don’t know what the right path is so you will listen to the expert. Only the AI isn’t an expert, assuming it is will quickly lead you astray and into the ditch and since you don’t know any better you will blindly follow along. I wasted hours, days and weeks following AI’s lead before I got smarter.
My experience is that AI really wants to help, but has little self-control and less strategy. Tell it you want a hole and it will start drilling before you tell it the diameter, depth or location you want.
With the Pi shop I had working metrics that stopped working unexpectedly a few months earlier. The AI first assumed a standard x86 Linux install, it is great for dropping context and assuming it knows what it’s doing. We spent days trying different configurations, libraries, images trying to tactically solve the problem. I started doing my own research and found that several months back, when my problem originated, the way the Pis accessed memory changed. No amount of configuration changes was ever going to work the old way, we had to change the approach (strategy), not something AI is good at, yet.
This is the bad of working with AI and why you need both instructions and a preamble to keep it focused. Since it will do enough halucinating on it’s own, don’t help it by having multiple topics per conversation, it will mix it all up, meld it and who knows what you will get.
The good can be very good.
Before I outline the good let me outline the typical website, especially a low budget one like this. First it’s static pages. Only when new content is added or pages edited does the content change. That means most sites get stale very quickly. A little bit of code can go a long way to making a simple static page site seem more fresh and upto date.
I simply had conversations with the AI and asked a few questions. The front page hero image, was static for a year. When asked, the Ai said it could generate a random image of the day from my galleries using a few lines of code and it told me which file and where I needed to put that code.
Initially the image would update on a page refresh, (the left image will refresh with the page, the right is the home page daily image) but that didn’t feel right so we changed it to once a day. The AI made the 24 hour period start & end at the time we were doing the work, late morning. Once I found out we had to tweak the code to change with the date, ie midnight.
Another conversation about page load time with images revealed a recent change in image file types for use on the web instead of jpg or png. Today the preferred image fomat is webP. I wanted to see for myself but had no way to easily do a side by side comparison. I have seen a before and after slider across an image so stuck up a conversation with Gemini, who responded with another function to add to the previous file. This too took a few back and forths to get a pretty nice way to compare two images.
Strategic Validation: File not found.
An image carousel is another slick way to display images on a page, IMHO. I imagine there are widgets to do this, but another conversation with AI said it too was easily done with another function to add to the growing file and growing list of site features.
Feeds & Streams
RSS, Really SimpleSyndication has been around since 1999. By the mid aughts it was the “plumbing’ for social media with the ornage RSS icon. It was the main way consumbed blogs, back in the day. In 2013 Google shut down Google Reader, but RSS survived as an open-standard “underground” for power users and remains the backbone of the entire podcasting industry.
Even though they aren’t what they once were, RSS still provides a means of getting fresh content into a website. A brief contestation and I have a tabbed interface for displaying current articles from selected feeds, The categories and feeds can be changed by editing a text file and are dynamic. Add a new category and it will generate a new tab, add more feed links under the category and they will automatically appear on the tab.
YouTube channels have IDs with that ID and a little bit of code it is easy to retrieve the links for the channels latest videos. Since you never know when a video will drop it is best to look for new videos more frequently than once a day. AI added a cron job to check every 4 hours and rebuild the file the page reads to update the page when called.
These are just a few of the ways I’m using AI to help me get more out of my life.
XnConvert is a great tool for resizing and converting images in one go. You can set up scripts by simply saving your settings to reload at a later time to get the same output.
XnConvert is a fast, powerful and free cross-platform batch image converter. It allows to automate editing of your photo collections: you can rotate, convert and compress your images, photos and pictures easily, and apply over 80 actions (like resize, crop, color adjustments, filter, …). All common picture and graphics formats are supported (JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF, WebP, PSD, JPEG2000, JPEG-XL, OpenEXR, camera RAW, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, PDF, DNG, CR2). You can save and re-use your presets for another batch image conversion.
The interface is intuitive with a drag and drop, left to right flow. The desktop version has way more image adjustments than the mobile version. You can set it up to automatically save your actions as a preset and to automatically load the last used preset as the starting point for the current batch. One note of caution, on the output tab I’ve had the radio button switch to the sorce folder, putting the converted files where the originals were, not the desired output folder. Easy to overlook.
I see this as being a regularly used tool in my camera to website pipline.
In the digital age, a photographer’s website is their most important gallery. However, it presents a constant dilemma: how do you showcase high-resolution work without slowing down your site or making it too easy for others to steal your images?
For years, the JPEG was the only option. In 2026, the strategic choice for professionals is WebP.
WebP (pronounced “weppy”) isn’t just a technical upgrade—it is a specialized “delivery format” that offers a unique combination of visual excellence, lightning-fast performance, and a surprising layer of protection for your creative assets.
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1. Visual Superiority Without the “Heavy” Lifting
The biggest misconception among creatives is that smaller file sizes mean lower quality. Because WebP uses advanced predictive coding (derived from professional video codecs), it handles gradients and fine details more efficiently than the aging JPEG standard.
The Result: WebP images are typically 25% to 34% smaller than JPEGs of the exact same visual quality.
The Strategic Benefit: Your portfolio can display crisp, full-width hero images that load instantly, even on mobile devices. This keeps potential clients on your page rather than losing them to a slow-loading “spinner.”
2. The “Format Friction” Factor: Deterring Image Theft
One of the most valuable “side benefits” for photographers is how WebP handles unauthorized use. While it isn’t a locked vault, it creates Format Friction that discourages casual scrapers and thieves.
The “Dead-End” Delivery Format
In a professional workflow, you have your Source Files (RAW, TIFF) and your Exchange Files (JPEG). WebP should be viewed as your Delivery Format—the “shrink-wrapped” version of your work.
Generation Loss: WebP is designed for viewing, not re-editing. If a thief “right-clicks and saves” your WebP file and attempts to open it in an older editor or re-save it as a JPEG, they encounter significant Generation Loss. The image quickly develops artifacts and color banding, making it useless for high-quality re-publishing or professional use.
Ecosystem Resistance: While browsers love WebP, many legacy print-shop workflows and older design suites still do not support it natively. This creates a technical hurdle; a casual thief will often give up and look for an easier-to-use JPEG on a competitor’s site.
Print Deterrent: WebP is optimized for screens (RGB). It lacks the deep metadata and CMYK structure required for high-end physical printing. It allows you to show the beauty of your work online while making the file technically “hollow” for someone trying to print it without your permission.
3. Dominating the SEO Landscape
Google created WebP, and Google rewards those who use it. Search engine rankings are now heavily influenced by Core Web Vitals.
By serving WebP, you satisfy the “Next-Gen Image Format” requirement, giving your portfolio a significant ranking boost over competitors who are still serving heavy, legacy files. For a photographer, this is the difference between being on page one or page ten of search results.
Comparison for the Creative Professional
Strategic Factor
Legacy JPEG
Modern WebP
Site Loading Speed
Slow / Heavy
Ultra-Fast / Light
Visual Fidelity
Standard
High-Efficiency
Transparency (Alpha)
No
Yes
Theft Deterrence
Low (Easy to edit/print)
Moderate (Format Friction)
Search Engine Rank
Neutral
Positive Boost
The Strategic Verdict: Protect the Craft
WebP allows you to showcase your best work in high definition without giving away the “keys to the kingdom.” By serving WebP on your front-end, you provide a world-class viewing experience while ensuring that your high-resolution “Master JPEGs” and RAW files remain safely in your private archives.
You aren’t just optimizing your images; you are strategically protecting your digital intellectual property.
The two comparison images were produced from the same full resolution image ~4k x 6k. I used XnConvert to resize and generate a .jpg and a webP to use here.
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PS: I have been using AI (Gemini 3) heavily the past few months. One of my questions was about improving page load times (shorter/less time), that’s when it mentioned webP. I had it educate me a bit, then produce and article (the above). It also told me about XnConvert, among a few others, to do the conversion & resize. That meant I needed to do a side by side comparison. I’ve seen those on the internet so asked AI. it quickly generated some code, that after a few turns back and forth is the comparison widget you used above.
This is the central dashboard for my home network. It is based on the HomePage software and as you can see uses widgets that report basic metrics for the machine or service. They are also links to the services they monitor for quick navigation.
The left column is for the core services in the Pi shop; most are available over the internet as well as on the home network. The center column are services needed for monitoring the system metrics & logs. They of course have their own dashboards.
The right column is for admin & maintenance. I started just wanting digital photo album, now I’m a system administrator, network engineer, website administrator, content creator (articles, photos & videos). And playing catchup in firefighting mode at every turn. Thankfully things are settling down to where I can use the system not fix it.
When a closer look is needed the monitoring stack comes into play.
