How I Built a Kids Media Library in Home Assistant (and helped me get more sleep)

Business cards with movie posters (and NFC stickers on the back)

Anyone with young children knows they love to get up early! I personally prefer sleeping in, which led me to build a system for my son (who was five at the time) so he could pull up approved content to occupy himself in the mornings.

Our TV remote was a bit too advanced for him to navigate, and since we no longer use DVDs, he needed a way to bypass the complicated menus. I decided to build an automated system that would handle the “heavy lifting” of turning on the tech and jumping straight to his favorite shows.

The Foundation: Home Assistant & ESPHome Reader

I already use Home Assistant to automate our lights and doors, so it was the natural choice for the brain of this project. My setup already included a Logitech Harmony Hub connected to Google TV for controlling the power and volume of our theater system.

The missing piece was a kid-friendly interface. In 2020, Home Assistant introduced a Tag integration that was perfect for this. I found a wireless, USB-powered tag reader using an ESPHome board. While you can certainly build your own, I purchased a pre-built version that came in a clean, 3D-printed case. Once I powered it up and added it to my Wi-Fi, it showed up instantly in Home Assistant.

How NFC Works

Once configured, the reader picks up any NFC (Near-Field Communication) tag tapped against it. An NFC chip is a tiny, secure integrated circuit that enables short-range wireless data transfer. When a tag comes into contact with the reader, its unique ID is sent to Home Assistant, allowing me to trigger specific automations. I bought a pack of small NFC stickers so I could create a physical “launch card” for every show and movie.

NFC Card Readers with USB power cable — Connected NFC Card Reader

NFC stickers on the back of the media cards — Connected NFC Card Reader

Integrating the Media

To make this work, Home Assistant needs access to the media library. Years ago, I connected my Plex Media Server to Home Assistant using the official integration. Since most of our kids’ shows are stored there (ripped from our old DVD collection), the integration allows me to bridge the gap between the NFC scan and the Harmony Hub.

The automation logic looks like this:

When: Scanning “Big Hero 6”
Then do: Turn on TV (Harmony Hub)
- Delay for 10 seconds (to fully power up TV and soundbar)
Perform action: Media player: Play media “Big Hero 6” on entity: Living Room TV

The Final Result

I created a unique automation for each movie or show Owen wants to watch. I periodically update the library as he discovers new favorites or loses interest in old ones. To make the physical cards, I used a simple business card template with the movie poster printed on the front and an NFC sticker hidden on the back.

Now, on weekend mornings, I get a bit more sleep. My son can head to the living room, grab the card for the movie he wants, and simply tap it to the reader to start his morning—no remote required.

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Mentos 14-flavor Discovery Roll

It’s been a while since I’ve been truly impressed with a new Mentos flavor (or flavors!). I’m a little delayed on this, but sometime over the summer Mentos released a new 14 flavor roll that includes like the title says, 14 individual Mentos with 14 individual flavors. There are a lot of the normal flavors in there that you know and love, but there are some interesting new ones that snuck into the mix. Flavors include passion fruit, grapefruit, blackcurrant, blueberry, lime, strawberry, raspberry, orange, lemon, watermelon, banana, grape, cherry and pineapple. The standout ones in my mind are banana (don’t think I’ve ever had a banana Mentos before), and the passion fruit or blackcurrant. I feel like the last two have popped up before in other rolls. Mentos claims, “Thanks to special packaging technology, the 14 flavors are wrapped in the same order, every time.” But in the multiple rolls I’ve had that has not been true. After painstakingly eating several rolls, I created a color key that aligns colors to flavors in case you get one that isn’t quite in the right order.

Anyway, find a roll and check them out!

2025 Holiday Geek Gift Guide

Happy Black Friday! Here we are again with another long list of geeky gift guides to help me (an you!) with your 2025 holiday shopping. As usual, I hope this helps you find the techy gifts for your friends and loved ones and avoid the dreaded “gift card cop-out.”

(Guides from previous years: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004)

What to Do With a Lifelong Mentos Collection

I like Mentos (which I think is obvious from an entire topic category dedicated to them on this site). I have liked Mentos for a very long time. I’m not sure exactly when my ~~obsession~~ love of Mentos started. It was probably sometime in high school, or maybe a bit earlier and was tied to the kitschy ads they were running in the 90’s. I got hooked, and never turned back.

My love of Mentos also turned into a collection over the years. I discovered that you could find unique flavors in different countries that were not available in the U.S. To feed my need for more (special) Mentos, I created a Mentos Ambassador Program so that when friends traveled abroad they could be awarded for bringing back flavors I’ve never seen or can’t get domestically. As you can imagine this led to a lot of Mentos!

I still love Mentos, but started some much-needed cleaning of the basement storeroom recently. This involved going through boxes that I’ve moved houses with multiple times and boxes that I haven’t opened since I got married many many years ago. Well guess what I found… a lot of Mentos that I’ve collected over the years. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve thought about what to do with a (quasi-perishable) collection of candy over the past 30 years and never really came up with a good answer. I love that these Mentos are somewhat unique, and they do bring back memories of when I got them and who gave them to me, and of course, the amazing flavors. I’m not really sure what to do with them. I’ve thought about somehow finding a way to archive them by taking photos and writing up tasting notes, but never really got around to it. At one point this site is where those new/special Mentos posts went, but I’ve fallen out of that a bit. So now I’ve got boxes(!) of old Mentos.

Some of these boxes and rolls needed to go. As I pulled them out of the storage boxes, they kind of stuck to the sides. It made me a little sad, but I guess it wasn’t that surprising that a perishable food product (even though they are the candy of the gods) would eventually spoil. So I tried to take some photos as a nod to archiving photos of the ones that I had to throw away.

several rolls of mentos of various sizes and flavors — A collection of old Mentos

I also have a bunch of Mentos-branded memorabilia. Obviously I don’t have the same spoilage problem with that, but thought it also had a place here. I don’t need to throw that out… but would like to find a way to display it somewhere. I will still from time to time do a random search for collectibles on ebay for Mentos.

I also found the letter and folder I was sent when I won a “year’s supply” (note the quotes, they did not last a year) of Mentos from a competition they held around 1998. I think they were doing some sort of Mentos music tour and I had to write a response to a prompt on their website and send in a certain number of wrappers.

Mentos prize award letter — My prize (you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more 90’s photo anywhere!)

My entry — My prize (you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more 90’s photo anywhere!)

This was not the only Mentos contest I won. Unfortunately, my second Mentos prize did not survive. It was an inflatable Mentos hot tub (with jets!) that was thrown away sometime in the early 2000’s. I probably have a 35mm photo of it somewhere in one of the other basement boxes I haven’t opened in 20 years.

As you can see… lots and lots of Mentos still live in my basement. Any ideas on what I should do with them? They have sentimental value to me, but soon they’ll just be a puddle of Mentos goo on the bottom of a box.

2024 Holiday Geek Gift Guide

Happy Black Friday, everyone! Yes, I’m still alive! ? My annual tradition of disappearing after my gift guide and then reappearing right before Black Friday continues! But hey, I’m back with a fresh batch of geeky and techy gift ideas for 2024. BTW, we’ve hit a milestone… 20 years of gift guides! Hopefully, this helps you avoid the dreaded “gift card fallback” this year.

(Guides from previous years: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004)

Palm OS Retrospective

I love these types of nostalgia inducing articles that take a look over computing history. Ars Technica just came out with one covering the history of Palm: Palm OS and the devices that ran it: An Ars retrospective. A Palm device is where I, along with many people, jumped into handheld computing, which with smart phones, we take for granted today. Palm the company may have been a bit ahead of its time, but seemed to have been mismanaged and bought and sold a lot, which eventually led its downfall. The article does a nice job of covering the early history of the company and what made this new area of tech take off, but they gloss over the end of lift for Palm as the moved into the smartphone era and Apple changed the game. I was one of the (probably very few) owners of the Palm Pre, which was a pretty unique device that did some things at the time that the smart phones it was up against couldn’t do. In fact, my old Palm Pre is still sitting on a shelf at home gathering dust.

2023 Holiday Geek Gift Guides

Happy Black Friday, y’all! It’s holiday shopping and gift giving time again! Has it been a year already? I’m a little bit delinquent in my posting here, since last year’s gift guide was the last time I posted… oops. Anyway, the traditional list of geeky and techy gift guides below helps me with my own holiday shopping, and hopefully helps you too. Most the links and list are geared towards geeks and gadgets, but there are several that include more general gift-giving. Like usual, I will keep this list up to date as I run across more throughout the holiday gift-giving season.

(Guides from previous years: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004)

2022 Holiday Geek Gift Guide

Here we go again. It’s holiday shopping and gift giving time! My tradition going back to 2004 has been to compile a list of geeky and techy gift guides to help with my own holiday shopping. Hopefully this list helps with your own gift giving. Most of these are geared more towards geeks and gadgets, but there are several that include more general gift-giving. As usual, I will keep this list up to date as I run across more.

(Guides from previous years: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004)

Firefox UI History

I love a good trip down tech memory lane. This one doesn’t to back too far, just 20 years to 2002. Firefox (originally Phoenix) came at the tail in the browser wars. Internet Explorer had pretty much won. Mozilla split out the browser from the bulky Netscape Communicator suite. It was truly a community project to make a smaller nimble fast browser. I recall installing Firefox on computer lab machines where I was working at the time and being excited with each new version. There were a lot of changes coming pretty quickly at that time, including the introduction of the tabbed browser window. This site popped up recently documenting the history of the UI/UX for Firefox as it evolved.

2021 Holiday Geek Gift Guide

We just passed Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year and are almost to Cyber Monday (do they still call it that?). My tradition going back to 2004 has been to compile a list of geeky and techy gift guides to help with my own holiday shopping. Hopefully this list helps with your own gift giving. Most of these are geared more towards geeks and gadgets, but there are several for more general gift giving. As usual, I will keep this list up to date as I run across more.

If you know of any more, let me know and I’ll add ’em to the list.

(Guides from previous years: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004)

After Dark Screensaver in CSS

This blog is quickly becoming a collection of trips down technology memory lane. These tech flashbacks keep landing in front of me. Today I ran across a site by Bryan Braun that recreated all of the old After Dark Screensavers in CSS. I fondly remember watching these screensavers roll by on the old Quadra and LC Macs while sitting in elementary and jr. high classrooms. This collection even includes probably the most well-known screensaver out there, the good ole flying toasters.

The Print Shop in a Browser

I think this is probably a sign that I’m getting old, but I love tech history stories that take you on a trip down memory lane. Palotronic just released a web-based Apple II emulator running The Print Shop, which is a huge nostalgic trip. I can remember printing hundreds of things from this program when I was a kid. It’s amazing how far we’ve come since only being able to select a half dozen fonts and only using solid-colored clip art images. I’m sure we destroyed countless print ribbons on the ole Apple ImageWriter II with this. I will say that tractor-fed paper still has an advantage in printing banners.

Fire up The Print Shop in your browser and send someone a holiday or birthday card. The emulator will provide you a PDF download of the thing you send to the printer. If you want to really get in the mood, play this in the background while it “prints.” Apparently Broaderbund, the company who created The Print Shop, still sells it. They’re up to version 23!

New He-Man and the Masters of the Universe

38 year ago, childhood me was enthralled with He-Man. I can remember pushing my mom to get home from the grocery store so that I wouldn’t miss the next episode. I can also remember getting out all my He-Man action figures to play along with the show as I watched it. Christmas, 1984 was the year my brothers and I got Snake Mountain and Castle Grayskull… what a great Christmas!

I can soon take a trip down memory lane and relive in the nostalgia of He-Man. Netflix will be releasing a new series in late July, and I cannot be more excited! The trailer for the new series dropped today!

2020 Holiday Geek Gift Guide

It’s time again for the good ole Holiday Geek Gift Guide (global pandemic edition). It’s be a really really long year, so hopefully this brings a bit more cheer to kick off your holiday shopping season, which will likely be mostly online this year. It’s time to get moving and buy some stuff for the people you love (or hate?). I use this list as a starting point for my own gift-giving to (geeky) friends and family. Most of the guides listed below fall into geeky/techie categories, but a few are also useful for general gift-giving as well. Like usual, I’ll try to keep this post up to date as I encounter additional gift lists and guides around the intertubes. If you know of any I may have misted, leave a comment and I’ll get it added. Happy (geeky) gifting!

(Guides from previous years: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004)

The History of Firefox

I’m a sucker for tech history stories. I can remember using the first Mosaic browser that became Netscape, then ended up losing the browser wars and being sold before morphing into Mozilla and becoming the basis of Firefox. I was working my first job out of college, and we had a computer lab tied to our area. I was personally invested in Mozilla and eventually Firefox and can recall trying to get it pushed to lab computers so that everyone else could see what an awesome browser it was… at least more awesome than Internet Explorer! I’d check every day for updates to see what new cool things were being added. It’s amazing where we’ve been over the past twenty-some years.