Homelab

Here’s a problem I suspect a lot of people with solar, a home battery and an EV are quietly living with: Every time the car started charging, my home battery emptied itself into the car. Off-peak electricity at 6.6p, carefully stored in a battery, then shovelled into an EV at up to 4.8 kW, leaving the house to run on 35p electricity for the rest of the evening. Not ideal. This post covers how I fixed it using plain Home Assistant automations (no Predbat), and how I used Claude Code to do most of the investigation and build. ...

This week two critical remote code execution vulnerabilities in PHP itself were disclosed: CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, nicknamed “PHP2Shell”. These aren’t bugs in a plugin or a theme, they’re in the PHP core engine, so anything running on PHP (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and the rest) was potentially exposed. Details leaked before the coordinated release, PHP pushed out emergency patches on 21 October, and there were already reports of active exploitation attempts. Yes, I patched. But it made me ask a question I’d been avoiding for a long time: Why am I still running a PHP server at home for a blog that is essentially an archive? ...